No mystery here, forget all the mumbo-jumbo about innoculants, turning intervals and precise carbon / nitrogen / oxygen / moisture ratios. Just know this: mix green clippings (grass trimmings, weeds, kitchen waste) with straw and / or dried tree leaves (deciduous, please) in about a 50/50 ratio. If it varies up to 3:1 (green to brown), you’ll be fine. Less green stuff just means a longer wait. Too much green stuff also means a longer wait (because the pile will stink too much to open it up!)

Don’t get all retentive on me here … do it by eye and you’ll be close enough. Give it a thorough wetting down to bring it about to the level of wetness of a wrung out washcloth. Make the pile at least three feet in every direction (but not over four) and walk away.

That’s it.

If you are in a hurry, turn it and re-wet it once or twice a week. Or, as I do, whenever your compost thermometer shows that it is cooling off significantly (my rule of thumb is “ambient + 20 deg. F.) If you are in a monsoon area, tarp it loosely. If your soil is totally miserable (clay / adobe / sand), dump the raw material into post holes dug as deep as you can comfortably make them. Leave a few inches at the top for a cap of a shovel full of soil. Wet it down if the soil is normally dry. In fact, this is an excellent way to expand an existing ‘at grade’ garden, no matter what your soil type.

A cold compost (such as in post holes) should not get meat unless you have a way of definitely keeping vermin, dogs and so on from digging in it. This can be done, but is probably not worth the effort. A hot compost pile simply needs to have meat scraps and greasy foods placed in the hot part of the pile. This will be enough to dissuade vermin … a hot compost pile can easily get to 130-170 deg. F. — hot enough to scald anything entering it.

The richest compost material you will ever find is your own manure. I’ll tell you how to collect and use it (sanely) in a future post, with a link to the absolute authority on home composting of human manure. (Hint: I jumped the gun … the link to his book is below. I have a copy, and it’s worth every penny.)

For now, though, leave the manure out of the mix. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to handle it, but you DO need to think ahead and make a few simple preparations.

Stuff rots … with or without our help. Unless you live in a recently autoclaved bubble, leave off those inoculants! The major difference a compost pile makes is that we are getting it to rot all in one place where it is easy to gather it up again. There is no need for shamanism of any kind. Although, for one-time fee of $30, I’d be glad to send you a 1 qt. starter of my own compost and wave my “magic trowel” over it while mumbling incoherently. I was going to mumble anyways. I might as well wave a trowel and get paid for it.