A Beginner’s Guide to Making Compost at Home

Posted July 16, 2024

In Permaculture Vision & Values, Soil & Compost

“Produce No Waste.” This core permaculture principle sounds like a green ideal to reduce pollution, yes? But that’s just the beginning: this principle also reminds us that nature transforms its waste products and dead matter into living soil…and we can, too.

Picture a wild forest: its floor is thick with dead leaves, branches, rotting logs, fungi, manure, fallen seeds and fruit, perhaps snakeskins, feathers, and bones, all decomposing to feed the tens of thousands of organisms in the soil and build a rich humus where new life can take root. Nothing organic is wasted.

This is the process you’re replicating when you begin composting at home. Most people think of compost as fertiliser when it is, in fact, a probiotic for the land, activating the soil as yoghurt activates your gut biota.

So let’s get started in recreating this miracle of nature, which is also an essential tool on your resilient homestead or farm!

De-Myth-tifying Compost

First of all, we need to dispose of the biggest myth around composting: Compost stinks, so you need to keep it away from your house!

Baloney! If you’re using a good recipe (we’ll get to that in a bit), your compost won’t have any odour.

Second, putting your compost pile far away from the house – while it might be close to the garden – defeats the purpose. Nobody wants to go schlepping out to the back 40 every day just to take out the kitchen scraps or give the compost a turn. Keep it close to your kitchen garden, with all its ingredients nearby, and you’ll find composting is a breeze.

Three Types of Compost Piles

Depending on how much you want to intervene in the composting process, you can make three types of piles: static, static continuous, and active.

A static pile is a pile that you build all at once and then leave alone to cook.
A static continuous pile is one you build over several months with kitchen scraps and yard waste, managing it as you add to it.
An active pile is one that you build all at once and then manage on an ongoing basis.

Watch as Carmen Lamoureux talks about her home-scale composting systems and some of the ways she uses active vs. static composting piles.

We are going to talk about how to start composting. We’ll look at building an active pile, which produces a lot of compost quickly.

There are two requirements for making an active compost pile:

1) having your recipe and ratios all worked out ahead of time; and

2) keeping all your ingredients ready to hand, so you can assemble the pile all at once.

Step #1: Creating Your Compost Recipe

“Who needs a recipe to build compost?” you might be asking. “You just start loading up the bin, right?”

Far from it! Crafting a recipe for active compost that cooks properly and reliably yields rich, nutrient-loaded black gold is a process worthy of the finest chef….though much simpler!

So what materials do you need to start composting? First, you need to find two types of ingredients that you can access reasonably consistently, year after year:

“Greens” or wet materials containing nitrogen and phosphorus, such as animal manure, grass clippings, food scraps and coffee grounds. These provide the nutrients for millions of microorganisms to drive the transformation of your compost.

“Browns” or carbon-based dry materials, such as straw, wood chips, paper and cardboard. These absorb the moisture provided by the greens, provide porosity for air flow, and keep your compost from going anaerobic. They’re also the key to keeping your compost from smelling bad: if you can smell the pile, it’s short on carbon.

In addition to your greens and browns, your compost bin needs three other essential components: air, heat, and moisture. The heat is generated through a biochemical process when your greens and browns are present in the correct ratio. You provide the air with sufficient carbon-based ingredients and turning the heap at regular intervals. Finally, you want to add water at the beginning, then again periodically as your compost cooks, to keep the microorganisms active and prevent the mixture from drying out.

Step #2: Finding Your Brown:Green Ratio

Once you have all of your materials, you want to build three or four test piles with different brown:green ratios to see how they heat up.

What is the brown:green ratio? It describes how many units of carbon (brown) are in the pile relative to units of nitrogen (green): so, 30:1 = 30 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen. The lower the ratio of carbon, the more heat your compost pile will generate.

You can apply this principle to individual ingredients as well: the lower the ratio of carbon in the ingredient, the more heat it provides. Chicken manure, for example, is around 1:1 carbon to nitrogen, while wood chips from a deciduous tree are about 500:1.

Watch below as Rob expands on the carbon to nitrogen ratios that you need in order to get a fungal-dominant pile.

Most compost books recommend brown to green ratios of 30:1; however, in my experience, a pile that is closer to 50:1 is a better option.

Generally, you’ll want roughly half your pile to be carbon-based – ideally, 1”-3”-inch wood chips that have been aged six months or more. The remainder of the pile should consist of nitrogen-based materials. You can measure these materials using buckets, wheelbarrows, or tractor buckets to get your ratios. Be sure to identify the ratio of each pile, and document your process.

You may be thinking, “This all seems pretty straightforward, so why do we need to build several different test piles?” While there are plenty of green materials you can use, their collective nitrogen content can be difficult to determine (for example, you may have a mixture of chicken and cow manure, grass clippings, general kitchen trimmings). Building a few experimental piles with different material ratios lets you observe how quickly or slowly the piles heat up.

Step #3: Keeping Your Compost Moist

Managing the moisture level of a compost pile is always challenging for beginners; it is very easy to water it too little or too much. Both will lead to failure; however, it is easier to correct under-watering than over-watering.

Ideally, your test piles should have enough moisture that when you take a handful of material and squeeze it as hard as you can, you barely get one drop of liquid.

If the mixture is too wet, you need to spread the pile apart to let it dry, then reassemble it. If the mixture is not wet enough, you need to water the pile while mixing to distribute the moisture.

Generally speaking, it’s best to use a spray head, set to produce the tiniest water droplets possible. This ensures an even water distribution throughout the pile.

The Stages of a Compost Pile

Before we get into managing your test piles, it’s important to know the four stages of the composting process:

Primary – if you’re using a good recipe, bacteria begin to consume the nitrogen, carbon, proteins, and fatty acids in your ingredients, breaking them down and multiplying massively, rapidly raising the temperature of the compost. See below for a hot compost pile steaming in cool morning air.

Secondary – once the temperature peaks, the compost cooks as the bacteria continue to break down the ingredients.
Finishing – with the ingredients fully broken down, the temperature of the pile begins to drop; the compost now is soil-like and crumbly and smells pleasantly earthy.
Curing – this phase finishes off any remaining bacteria or pathogens that might remain and allows the compost to become a living soil ecosystem.

Monitoring Your Test Piles

The primary stage of a compost pile is where problems are likeliest to show up, so you need to monitor and support the biochemical process and the bacterial activity in your test piles. After you set them up, you’ll need to come back on the second day to check their moisture level and take their temperature with a long-stemmed thermometer. Rob demonstrates how to use a compost thermometer below:

We try to set our piles up so that they heat up to 50°C (122°F) after three or four days. Once they heat up, you need to monitor for temperature, turning them whenever the pile exceeds 60°C (140°F). Be sure to document your process at each step!

Assuming that your moisture levels are correct, if the piles heat up too quickly and shoot past 60C on day 2 or 3, then there is too much nitrogen. If they don’t heat up enough, the nitrogen levels are too low, or the pile is not mixed correctly. Personally, we like slow-heating piles as they are less labour-intensive.

Once the pile exceeds 60°C, you’ll need to flip the pile to keep the microbes supplied with oxygen. If the pile stays too long at 60°C or shoots past 60°C, the pile will generally go anaerobic and can even light on fire.

This is another reason to start out with test piles: they give you the ability to monitor the temperature of each pile and how fast they heat up. Once you identify the best-performing pile and tweak its recipe, you can increase production.

Covering Your Compost

Maintaining inner moisture levels are important with composting. Most people make the mistake of using tarps, which do not allow oxygen diffusion and can lead to the pile going anaerobic.

We prefer to use Compostex, which is a dual-purpose, oxygen-permeable material. One side sheds rain, which is excellent for composting in wet climates, while the other side absorbs rain, which is great for environments that are mostly rain-free.

Seen above: A diagram of the two sides of Compostex Compost Cover (from the Compostex website).

Curing Your Compost

Once the compost has finished its cycle, and there is no heat left in the pile, you want to let it cure for six months to a year. This is when the fungi start to work on the pile, improving the quality and consistency of the pile. Most soil today is missing this fungal component, and so adding this rich, fungally-dominant compost to our trees, gardens and orchards can have dramatic impacts on their pest resistance, nutrient density and growth rates of our plant systems.

When to Harvest Your Compost

So your compost is rich, dark, earth-scented, and crumbly, with a rich ecosystem of worms and bugs happily settling in…now, when do you put it to use?

We recommend top-dressing your garden with several inches of compost in fall, gently turning it in so the freeze-thaw cycles integrate it into the soil. Rob discusses the steps to making perfect compost below: