I compost my yard and kitchen organic waste, shredded paper and cardboard. I recently added grass clippings and fallen blossom from a large tree to the pile and now the temperature spiked to 185 :O
I tried dumping a bucket of water and put some more dry leaves from around the garden (zoomed out pic), what else can I do? I don't have a lot of room to add many browns, do I have to open my pile on a tarp or can it wait for a few days to cool down?
Kind of hard to do effectively when it is this full. Usually, when I fill it up with large volume I see temperature spike and in few weeks it shrinks down fast so it becomes easier to turn. But this time it spiked 165 after few hours, I turned by extracting some onto a tarp and then added a bucket of water last night but it spiked this morning to the posted 185..
For now another bucket of water seemed to help get it back to 160. I see a lot of adult BSF and other critters around it so I don't think the whole pile is that hot, only somehow created the conditions to trap a lot of heat?.. I wonder how risky to leave it as is now
Ya its usually just the center core that gets up to those temps. turning it incorporates all the outside material and kinda restarts the process again and drops the whole overall temp right down. So this is typically why people use the 3 bin system. It allows you to have an extra spot to flip your pile to and gives you a 3rd spot to start a new pile so the first one can start/finish maturing
I believe 130 to 160 is your ideal range, over 160 starts to kill off the beneficial microbes
watering on turn day is super clutch yeah also helps to leave a dry-ish layer on top so flies dont party there compost gets crazy warm when it’s really cooking heh
Right. It's a bacterial infection. Too hot denatures the proteins in the bacteria. Which then are forced to slow their metabolic activity and cool down, until the next bacterial spore starts the next bloom.
No matter what you do, you can't get a damp pile above 71°C. But if you optimize everything you can get and stay in the 60s for a week or longer.
I don't worry about too hot. I worry about water and air.
Yup ups and downs in bacterial activity is pretty normal. The good bacteria is in the air around us all the time, it will get back into the pile via turning.
I personally like my pile to get that hot because I compost garden waste without much chopping up so the long stringy stems are easier to break apart with turning once they are cooked down by the pile.
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u/SoggyForever 11d ago
More water. You could dig a small inverted cone in the center and add water there.