Additives to Compost?

[caligrown]

I have a tumbler that we have been trying to compost in for about a year now. What we have been doin just doesn't seem to be working. This time I have been doing some reading on the browns vs greens and I think this has been our main problem.
I don't have access to a lot of stuff so our compost mainly consists of grass clipping, vegetable scraps, ground egg shells and brown paper bags. I am wondering if there is something I should/need to buy from the nursery to add to it. Manure, blood meal, bone meal, gypsum??? Or if there is anything I can do to help make it compost faster.

[Dillbert]

drum composters do take some expertise / experience. it's a small environment, nearly air tight sealed / enclosed. seems like a really good idea, but over the years, a lot of people who got one stopped using it...

it does take a "proper" mixture of greens (high N) and browns (high carbon) to compost "most efficiently" - note the most efficiently thing - personally I just toss everything and anything that comes in hand in a pile and wait. a year, sometimes two. everything rots, eventually.

but in a drum, too wet, too cold, too dry, not the right mix - makes for stinky glop or solidified mass - getting it "right" does take experience in how much of what to add when.

grass clippings & kitchen waste - all "greens" - and wet / high moisture, to boot. easiest fix may be to stock straw bales - add the dry straw (carbon) to the mix - roughly by volume 1:1.5 to 1:2

[rainbowgardener]

I agree sounds like you need a lot more "browns." As dilbert mentioned, you can buy a bale of straw and just feed it in a bit at a time as needed. Come fall, collect lots of bags of fall leaves (I bring home bags of leaves that people put out for pick up) which are a good brown.

I wouldn't add manure, which despite its color is definitely "green" i.e. high Nitrogen, moist.

I don't think you really need any purchased additives. You may need to add extra air holes-- this is frequently the case with tumblers. Since it is not in contact with the soil, it might help to add a handful of good garden dirt now and then, to be sure it is inoculated with soil microbes.

[brinboise]

I mulch up leaves in the fall with my lawnmower and put them in large garbage bags for use later in my composter....nice browns. I also have a bale of straw for the same purpose, but the straw is pretty slow to compost-compared to the leaves. As others stated you need a lot of aeration in the composter barrel....I had to drill quite a few holes in mine. Don't give up, it might take awhile to get the right mixture.

[toxcrusadr]

Everyone picked up on the fact that you had a lot of greens and the advice to add browns seems to be a good one. However, we could use more detail on what exactly is wrong with the compost and why you think it's 'not working.'

Is it dry or wet?

Does it smell earthy and good or does it smell rotten?

When was the last time you added anything to it?

Is it crumbly and loose or is it in one big clump?

We can help diagnose a bit more accurately with this info.

[*dim*]

I've read that if you mix organic unstrapped black molasses (available from most health stores), mixed with the water that you use to keep the compost damp, it's like adding petrol to fire

it's supposed to 'speed things up' .... how true that is, I'm not sure, but I'm trying it

[imafan26]

If you have mostly greens, you will have a stinky, slimy wet mess. You do need more brown.

Wood chips, newspaper, stems of plants (chopped small). Use trimmings from hedges, trees, and corn stalks; toss them in a chipper. They will also contain some greens from the leaves.

I had the slimy mess when I tried to make compost out of mostly weeds. I don't have a lot of browns so I use newspaper it has a high C:N ratio, so you don't need much. Stockpile the browns until you have enough. The piles only got hot enough when it was built all at once. Put the greens and browns into the pile at the same time, add water, add a shovel full or two of garden soil and don't add anything more. Do not turn for 4 days.

Take it's temperature. It should be steaming in two days. If it is not, the ratio was not quite right. if it still is slimy, add more browns, if it is dry add a little more water, don't make it soggy. Don't open the door if it is steaming again. After the 4th day turn once a day, every day, for a couple of weeks before you check on it again. It should start shrinking and looking less like the source material. It should not smell really putrid. Fungus will probably be growing in it.

Once you figure out how much of the browns you need for the greens you have, then you'll be able to make better compost. It is actually easier to start with materials that have a 25-30:1 C:N ratio to start with. Adding something with a high carbon like newspaper C:N 170:1, I would have to have 5-6 parts green to each part of newspaper to achieve the 30:1 ratio. Hint it is best to put the newspaper through a shredder first.

I made the best compost by bag composting, only, thing was that it was not very balanced. It contained mostly corn stalks and I added fertilizer to balance the nitrogen source, but it worked. I got a couple of handfuls of compost out of it.

http://whatcom.wsu.edu/ag/compost/funda ... trogen.htm

[caligrown]

Thanks everyone, hopefully this go round will work out better.

toxcrusadr, last go round ended very dry and big clumps and sticks. It have very obvious "I know what that was" throughout the whole mixture. I'm not really sure what it smelt like as I just got frustrated and threw it all out to start again.

[rainbowgardener]

Interesting. Now we see why tox was smart to ask that question. Was the last go round that ended up like that made of the same ingredients you are talking about: grass clippings, vegetable scraps, ground egg shells and brown paper bags? If so, where did the sticks come from then?

Dry and it didn't break down (so you could still recognize the original ingredients) and it didn't have any over-powering odor sounds like too much browns, not enough moisture, and / or too little quantity of ingredients. Composting is sort of a chain reaction. When the ingredients are in a pile, when some start to break down, they give off heat, which helps others to break down, which gives off more heat and pretty soon you have a nuclear explosion ... I mean finished compost. In a pile, most of the composting happens in the interior of the pile. People have made compost from small amounts of ingredients, in small containers. In your tumbler, if you had only a relatively small amount of ingredients for the size of the drum and you tumble it, then all the materials are getting scattered apart.

If your materials are dry, you do need to keep adding water. A compost pile needs to stay as moist as a wrung out sponge. If it dries out, all processes stop until more moisture is added.

[caligrown]

The last pile was not the same ingredients. I did some more research this time around and figured browns was the problem, so I started adding posts of shredded brown paper bags. I think my husband was adding the trimmings from out trees and that's where all the sticks were coming from.
It does have a small amount in it right now, would it be better if it where fuller? I have been asking water to keep it moist, I figured it was drying due to the week of triple digit temps.

[rainbowgardener]

You don't want it packed in so stuff doesn't tumble, but yes, I think short of that better if fuller.

The idea of a tumbler is batch composting. You collect a whole batch of compostables, and then load it up all at once. Then you don't add any more while all that is working, just collect stuff for the next batch.

[mattie g]

You don't want it packed in so stuff doesn't tumble, but yes, I think short of that better if fuller.

The idea of a tumbler is batch composting. You collect a whole batch of compostables, and then load it up all at once. Then you don't add any more while all that is working, just collect stuff for the next batch.

Rainbow, you have it exactly right.

I've gone through the process of making four batches of compost in my tumbler now, and I'm getting better at it each time. You definitely want to have it quite full to start off with so things can heat up quickly. Before you know it, the tumbler is only 3/4 full because things are breaking down really quickly. At that point I start adding a little more stuff (grass clippings, shredded fall leaves, kitchen scraps, and garden waste) in batches to the tumbler to bring it up to fullness again. I do this a couple times. When all is said and done, I usually end up with a tumbler that's about half full of nearly completed compost.

In the future, I might keep adding in batches for a little longer because when things break down to the point of only having a half-full tumbler, they cool down quite a bit and it can take a long time for things to continue break down at that point. If I can keep it fuller, I should be able to maintain a fairly hot tumbler, and thus keep things breaking down and giving me a more complete compost.

After a batch is good and broken down, I dump it into my "nearly finished" pile out of the way in the back yard where the worms start to do their thing...

[toxcrusadr]

The last batch with the uncomposted sticks - actually any batch with uncomposted browns - could have been recovered by mixing in more greens and letting it cook for awhile. Actually there is no compost pile that can't be adjusted and recovered. No matter what the imbalance is, you cal always get back to a good compost product if you know what adjustments to make.

That clump of half-digested sticks would also make a good semi-composted mulch around plants, to feed the soil. There are always alternatives!

[imafan26]

If the sticks were big, then maybe things would also decompose faster if the material was chopped up into smaller pieces with a shredder, machete, or lawn mower. Smaller pieces bread down faster.