I have a mix of dirt, pine needles and leaves, and some eggshells and coffee grids. I need to get this mixture working harder. If I add more leaves from the ground to clean up my yard – what should I focus on adding to the mix to get it moving faster in this tumbler? How full can this get before I should wait to empty out ‘soil’. And how do I know when it’s really ready? I still see pine needles and eggshells not broken down yet.
by bradykp
4 Comments
Way more greens
* Carbon-to-nitrogen ratio
* Surface area of particles
* Aeration
* **Moisture**
* Temperature
It looks a bit dry. It needs to be wet without standing water. Like a spunge. The pine needles don’t soak up water. But they are great for better airflow, just like pruning waste. I always add some of material that doesn’t compost fast. Increasing the airflow when the rest of the material is almost finnished.
The more mass you have the more easy it is. I always try to keep my bin full. I always add and mix when it has srunk, until i don’t get it hot anymore. Then i add worms and fungi and let it settle for 4 to 6 months. Doesn’t have to be in a compost bin, you can make a curing bin.
If it’s not hot. You can add some composting worms and see if they want to escape. If they stay and multiply your compost is fine and patience is key.
More coffee grounds is always great in the mix. Where did you get them before?
I’ve gotten grounds from local cafes and starbucks. Stuff from one of the local cafes was very clean, just compacted almost dry espresso pucks, but the starbucks batches were much bigger and wetter, evidently a lot more drip coffee, with filters and a few plasticky teabags and coffee packets. It took 10 min to pick all that stuff out, and I didn’t mind. They hadn’t been keeping “grounds for gardens” because there isn’t much call for that here at this season, so this was the garbage sacks from their green bins, and if I asked them to keep grounds for gardens it might be cleaner.
Don’t worry about the eggshells. Smash them up with a tool if they are still in big pieces, but don’t worry. They’ll last another year or so and probably gradually disappear, and they’re fine either way. They’re like calcium carbonate mineral bits of soil, no problem.
I’ve never mixed pine needles into my compost. If they are resistant to composting, then in the future you could use them as surface mulch instead, where I’m sure they’ll be great. Surface mulch of natural materials, kept permanently on top of the soil, does amazing things for soil quality, as good as mixing in compost, if not better. And it hosts a whole ecosystem of small spiders and other predators that keep plant-eating pests under control.
I filled mine to max capacity with coffee grounds and kitchen scraps from the past month from all my neighbors and moved it into a temp greenhouse until I get my big one online. It reached 110F inside for the first time yesterday, getting small tumblers to have runaway exothermic microbial activity is incredibly difficult.
Those pine needles will take years to break down. What I recommend is sifting and removing those, and making a cold compost overflow pile or use the pine needles as mulch.
You should put a tray under your tumbler to collect the compost tea runoff to recycle it through your tumbler to saturate the bulk mass inside especially if you add a lot of browns at once. If you have excess compost tea it is an amazing liquid fertilizer as well.
temp greenhouse for reference
https://preview.redd.it/hxgiz7q4xeog1.jpeg?width=1542&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=70e50c0d7be1dc763764011c9333fd50aa5aa4d9