How I Make HEAPS of Compost in My Backyard (Feat. Chickens)

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Want to know how to make compost at scale without it becoming a full-time job? I walk you through my low-effort, high-yield backyard compost system that helps me produce enough nutient-rich compost to sustain our vegetable garden year-round.

From sourcing materials like wood chips and coffee grounds to leveraging our chickens’ tireless work ethic and harnessing heat, this episode covers everything you need to know to scale up your compost production with minimal effort and cost. Plus my game-changing tool that’s taken my compost to the next level.

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00:00 – Introduction: Making Heaps of Compost with Minimal Effort
00:40 – My Backyard Compost System Overview (Compost Bays & Area)
01:24 – Sourcing Bulk Materials: Waste Streams (Wood Chips & Coffee Grounds)
02:18 – Composting With Chickens: Their Role and Benefit
03:38 – Building a Compost Pile vs. Cold Composting
03:59 – The Heat Factor: Hot Compost Explained
05:12 – Turning Your Compost Pile: Frequency & Timing
06:14 – Sifting Compost: My Game-Changing Tool
07:41 – Summary: My Compost System Tips
08:13 – Conclusion: Thanks for Watching

#Compost #GardeningTips #SustainableLiving #BackyardGarden #OrganicGardening #Permaculture

[Music] The reality of producing enough organic vegetables 
to feed Maddy and I is that I need to produce a lot of compost—about 10 cubic meters a year, which 
is like 30 of these. I’m a full-time architect, so there are only so many hours in the week that 
I can dedicate to making compost. It has taken me a lot of trial and error to come up with a 
backyard composting system that’s high-yield, high-quality, low-effort, and 
zero-cost. In this episode, I’ll be walking you through my composting 
system and the six key elements to consider if you’re looking to scale up your own compost 
production. Watch to the end because I’m going to share the one piece of equipment that 
has been a game changer for my compost. So, this is my property. You can see 
my house, garage, compost bays in the driveway, and the greenhouse. But most 
importantly, you can see the compost area, which also doubles as our chicken run. I’ve 
located the area here because it’s a shady spot covered by fruit trees, close to the 
garden, and not visible from our house. I’ll explain all of this in more detail, but 
at a high level, this is how my system works: All the material gets dumped into this section to 
begin the composting process. Once it’s filled up, I’ll move it down to the next section to make 
room for more material. This process continues, and the compost makes its way down the hill until 
it reaches the other end of the compost area, by which time it’s fully broken down 
and ready to go out into the garden. What materials do I use? Well much of what I 
compost comes from the garden and the kitchen scraps, but those alone are not sufficient to 
create the amount of compost my garden needs. So in order to scale up my system, I’ve found 
two waste streams I can reliably tap into for free. The first is woody mulch from my local tip, 
which is a great high-carbon material, and the other is coffee grounds, a great high-nitrogen 
material that a local company collects from cafes all around Melbourne and delivers to 
gardeners for free. I’ve built some bays in my driveway so that I can easily store 
large amounts of these materials. For you, think about what waste streams 
you might be able to tap into, whether it’s autumn leaves, wood 
chips, sawdust, or even animal manures. [Music] Chickens are not an essential part of compost 
making, but they are an important part of my system because they save me a lot of time and 
money and improve the quality of my compost. As soon as I bring any new material into the 
compost area, they start scratching, spreading, and mixing it all around. This is beneficial 
for three reasons: first, they’re getting the process of decomposition started straight away 
by increasing the surface area of the material; second, as they scratch, they also poop, adding 
their nitrogen-rich manure to the pile; and third, as they scratch, they spread the material out, 
which allows all the material to get evenly wet when it rains. Moisture is so important in a 
compost pile, but getting all your materials soaked through can be time-consuming, 
which I used to do with a wheelbarrow. By making compost in the rainy season, I 
can skip this step, saving a lot of time. Speaking of the rainy season, this 
video has been bloody challenging to make because of the weather. 
They’re getting the process of decomposition started. This is so unpleasant! 
The third reason is subtle but important. So, we will make this video at all costs. If 
you’re enjoying this video so far, I’d love it if you gave it a like and subscribed. It would 
really help my channel. Okay, back to the video. [Music] So, this is a bunch of material that I’ve been 
building up over the past few weeks. In it, there are grass clippings, woody mulch, coffee 
grounds, kitchen scraps, and here I’ve got their manure from their coop that I’m going to spread 
on it as well. I could leave it all spread out, and it would break down over time, but what 
I’m going to do is build it up into a big pile. That’s going to allow me to introduce 
the next element in my system, which is heat. Let me tell you about how hot composting works. 
When you assemble all the material into a pile, what you’re doing is reducing the surface area 
of the material exposed to the outside air. As the microbes feed on it, their heat will actually 
cause the pile to get hotter if the pile is big enough. As the pile gets hotter, it becomes more 
hospitable for the microbes, and their population increases, so the pile gets hotter again. If 
you’ve got the balance of materials right, this process should top out at about 55 to 
65°C. This seems to be the agreed optimal range for maximizing decomposition while minimizing 
the amount of nutrients lost to off-gassing. It’s also the temperature range at which you 
can kill weed seeds and plant pathogens. So, here’s my finished pile. It only took me about 
15 minutes to make this, and that was greatly assisted by the fact that the material was already 
nice and wet from the rain we had last night. Now that it’s done, I’m going to cover it with a 
tarp and leave it to heat up and decompose. The tarp also locks the moisture in, stops it from 
getting too wet, and keeps the chickens off. To turn or not to turn is a question 
I’ve asked myself many times during my years of making compost. On one end of the 
spectrum, you have the lazy gardener approach, where you just pile it all up, let it break 
down, and wait somewhere between six months to a year. On the other end of the spectrum, 
you’ve got the high-effort 18-day compost, where you’re turning the compost every day or 
every two days. I’ve tried both, and I think both can work. But for my system, I’ve landed closer 
to the lazy gardener approach, and here’s why: I use woody mulch, which takes a long time to 
break down and requires fungal activity. Fungi do not like to be disturbed. But if I don’t turn 
the pile at all, the material on the outside won’t break down at the same speed as the material on 
the inside. For me, what works best is to turn my pile twice because it’s a balance between not 
disturbing the fungi too much and allowing the material to break down evenly. I try to wait one 
to two months between turns, and I usually find that it takes four to six months to have finished 
compost. This pile here is about a month old, so I’m going to cover it with a tarp and leave it for 
another one to two months before I turn it again. So, this is a finished pile of compost. It’s 
about six months old and ready to go out into the garden. But before I distribute it, I’m going to 
sift it. I’m about to show you the fastest way to sift compost, and I can sift about a cubic meter 
of compost in 20 minutes—game changer! But let me know if you think you can sift faster. This method 
has saved me so much time and money because, without it, I wouldn’t be able to make all 
my own seed-raising mix. I’ve seen a lot of different contraptions out there, but 
I think all you really need is a simple, elegant A-frame sifter. It’s just two timber 
frames, which in this case I actually found on the side of the road, with a bit of steel welded 
mesh over the top. That’s it! The key to getting this to work is to make sure your compost 
is dry enough; if it’s too wet, this won’t work well at all. This is where the chickens come 
in handy again because if my compost is too wet, I can get the chickens to scratch through 
it. They’ll break up clumps, spread it out, and help dry it out. The other thing they do 
at this stage is pick out any worms that might be in the compost. If I’m sifting compost for my 
seed-raising mix, I’ve got this extra frame here, which I can put on top, that has a finer mesh. 
You can see that what I’m left with is finely sifted compost. Once the compost is sifted, it 
comes back out into the garden to complete the nutrient cycle, feeding the soil and, in turn, 
helping our plants thrive. A lot of it will be spread on garden beds, and the rest will 
go into the greenhouse to start seedlings. [Music] So, here’s a summary of the most important 
elements that have allowed me to scale up my compost system: 1. I set up my compost 
area close to where I garden and combined it with my chicken run. 2. I source 
materials from local waste streams. 3. I use chickens for their manure and their 
tireless work ethic. 4. I use heat to break down the piles faster. 5. I turn infrequently 
and let time do the work. 5. I use an A-frame for speedy sifting. If you have any questions 
or want to know more about my compost system, let me know in the comments. Thanks for 
watching, and don’t forget to subscribe!