Common Compost Problems FIXED! & How to Turn (Your SIMPLE) Compost

Hey this is at 130 degrees and this is a great time to turn your compost pile. Today I'm going to take you through the turning process and answer a few troubleshooting questions. All right now that we got that job done this is the mega pile and this is how much compost it takes for us here at Riverbend. We're going to get to turning this one. We're at about 130 degrees and this is doing just great. Anytime you get into the 100 120 degree range this is ready to go ready to turn or you can leave it sit like I said this has been sitting for two weeks and we're holding temperature real well. I could let it go longer but it's also going to take longer. You could also turn this once you get up into that temperature range every two days if you want and that's really going to accelerate the process. It's up to you and I want this to be doable for you so that you can make it work. If you get busy and you forget about it for a couple days cool no problem just make sure that when you check it regularly and when you see the temperature if you see it start to go down that's the time to turn it. That heat is indicative of all the biological life in here at work and so when your temperature starts to go down that means that it's cooling off the work is slowing down and either it's finished which obviously in this case it's not or it's time to turn it and make sure you got enough oxygen and moisture inside the pile. I just tied my frame together with baling twine. Baling twine is like the duct tape of a farm and I do not like to see it lying around. I don't want the trash however we do save it because it is very very useful and hey you're probably noticing that there's some grass growing out of this this is probably some oats or wheat or something that was in some feed and we certainly don't want that stuff to survive and it's good if you cannot get it into your materials to begin with however there is a way to deal with that and that is through what we call thermal composting or basically just raising the temperature and once you get up over 140 especially towards 150 to 160 that's then into thermal composting range and that does two really beneficial things. One is it kills seeds and so that you'll eliminate all this so that it doesn't come up in your garden. The other thing it does is it starts breaking down inorganic compounds like pesticides and herbicides or anything else in there and that's always a great thing I mean hopefully it's not in here to begin with but this is really useful if it is. I'm going to be seeing on this next round if I can increase the temperature and hold it up at a higher temp to deal with all of this. Got our frame reset up here just about ready to start breaking this down you can see it kind of holds together real well on its own. I just want to check inside we know with the temperatures that it's doing well and you look in here you can see things are starting to break down it's starting to get dark it's warm and it's maybe just a little dry you know we want that moisture content where you can just squeeze a drop of water out of it so I'm going to say it's a little dry as I'm reaching down in here it's getting hot down in there too but we can see stuff's happening and I think I'll add a little bit of moisture to my layers as I go. Now when we turn you want to try to mix up what's on the outside with the inside ideally it would be great if we could get everything that's out here into the middle and vice versa that's it's kind of hard to do you do your best but basically you just want to make sure that everything's getting mixed up really well and in this case I'm going to add a bit of moisture. If it's clumping then you want to break it up a little bit and the reason it starts to clump is it just settles and it gets a little heavy and starts sticking together and that starts limiting oxygen flow. If you remember in the last video I was telling you we want this our compost piles to be aerobic which just means they're really fueled by oxygen. They've got enough moisture in them to keep them alive but we're really feeding the oxygen loving bacteria and so by turning it and breaking up these clumps we're just introducing air back into the process and moisture if needed. You need the right tools you can see this pitchfork here is just getting a little thin for moving the stuff around so I think I better go grab another one. Well hey what are you doing out? I don't even know if you guys have seen little Millie yet. This is Tilly's new calf. Hello sweetie. And you're not supposed to be out here. All right come to mama. Oh that a girl. Let's get mama in here. Little escape artist. Here comes mama we better let get back together. All right well mission accomplished we can get back to the compost pile. Now that we've got a better tool for the job we can get back to work. Troubleshooting tip here if your pile has not gotten up into temperature within about four days or so then there's two things that are likely wrong. One of two things that are likely wrong. Either you don't have enough moisture and you can see this is pretty dry and it still got up to temperature but if you don't have enough moisture in here it's just not going to activate and get going. The other one is not enough nitrogen not enough green materials and so if it's dry and you can't squeeze just a little drop of water out of it I would assume that's probably your moisture and you need to add moisture to it like we're doing here. Now my pile was good but I'm hoping to increase the heat a little bit so and it's showing a little bit lighter moisture so I'm going to go ahead and add and we'll keep mixing. Another reason your compost pile might not heat up is if it's too wet and if you grab I just watered this and it still isn't too yeah but see if you grab it and it does that in your overall pile I just added water to this because I want mine to be wetter because it'll dry but if you reach in anywhere in your pile and you get a lot of water like that then it's a little too wet and what you want to do in that case is probably just add a little bit more of carbon-rich materials. Another troubleshooting tip here is if your pile starts to get stinky and it just smells bad it should not smell bad I mean it's going to smell a little bit like the manure you put in it in the beginning or the food waste but it shouldn't get rank or putrid or anything like that and if that's the case it is probably one of two things which is too much water and probably too much nitrogen and in either case the answer is really going to be the same and that is to add back in some browns or some carbon-rich materials to get some balance in that because just means that you've got too much nitrogen in there you know or moisture versus carbon. We've turned it we've got it all mixed up and I've added a bit of water because mine was dry even though it was getting up to temperature just felt a little bit dry and you want to add your thermometer back right away and it's going to be cooler than it was it might take a day or so for it to come up to temperature you can still see it's still moving up towards 90 degrees so it'll warm back up pretty quickly and again remember as long as you've got your ratios right your temperature is your guide you can turn this every other day if you really want to keep it oxygenated and get it cranking we can let it go I let this last one go for two weeks it's going to go pretty slow if we do that but as long as your temperature is up there it's working and as soon as you see that temperature start to drop then you definitely need to turn it I'm going to try to turn this one a little more often see if I can get it cranking a little bit better and get it up into the 150s or so and burn off maybe some of the seeds that appear to be in here and I'll follow up with you guys and give you an update and answer some questions.