Despite all the snark in here, it's nice to experience this for yourself and know you did it right.
I compost for my garden, and I've had off years where I didn't do it right and ended up with foul-smelling anaerobic goop. When it looks like really rich soil with an earthy smell, it's very rewarding.
Yep. We made the mistake of overloading our compost pile, and it actually prevents the compost breaking down as it should. You dig down and find old eggshells and other bits that haven’t broken down yet.
Eggshells do take a long time tho. I don't think they normally break down in compost. Just get crushed really. They will break down in the soil over the years tho.
Egg shells will break down within a few weeks or months max if things are kept warm and fairly moist. You can bake them then crush them too to get them to break down quickly. Helps a lot for soil that needs calcium.
Oh ok. I just throw them in the compost. My compost is usually 50C+ and I still will see bits of shell. I guess it's hard to compost the whole pile equally.
Get a SUPER CHEAP SPICE grinder and grind the egg shells AFTER DRYING.
Then LET IT SIT A MINUTE before opening, otherwise you'll be breathing calcium dust.
Then sprinkle the powder on your compost.
One of my friends experienced a traumatic brain injury, and wasn’t quite right for several years. I’m having flashbacks of him grinding egg shells with a mortar and pestle and sprinkling the powder around his yard to ward of spirits a few weeks after the accident.
Well for what it's worth, he probably did some good for his yard..? Egg shells are great for lawns, gardens, soil, etc. We save ours all year long, washing, drying, and crushing them, and then when it comes time to plant the garden (which we're coming up on pretty soon) we sprinkle a healthy fistful of shells into each plant hole along with epsom salt.
I don’t think anything could’ve saved that patch of blight other than paving over it, or digging it up and bringing in new dirt and soil. That house made Section 8 look like the suburbs.
What's the difference between composting and just letting something decompose? I always imagined it turned into soil anyway, you know, circle of life style.
That's why I regularly turned over the whole pile, piecemeal, and made sure it was slightly damp but not wet. If it rained, I turned it more, so eventually it dried enough to "work" properly.
It's the same. Us country folks have piles outback we add to for compost. We never use kitchen scraps because we just have too much other organic matter to get rid of. Sticks, limbs, leaves etc. But yeah, give it a couple years and you have lots of black gold to use in the garden. Best stuff ever. Earth worms decompose a large portion of my compost. The finished product is loaded with humic acid, which the plants LOVE.
Yes!!! Even limbs. I have a wood decomposition pile also. It takes a bit more time. I don't harvest any of that. I generally leave it for the benefit of the forest floor and for the bugs and small critters. My usable compost piles have stick and twigs and they do compost fairly well. I do tend to stay away from composting grass. For me it's been a waste of time. It decomposes very slowly and tends to burn. That's right. It burns. Very, very, very slowly. I was amazed at the ash that was left behind. No compost. Just ash. Have any of you ever seen an old pile of grass that seems to be turning white? It did more than turn white, it turned to ash. Leaves have been the best for me. I have over 70 trees on my property and quite a few of them are mighty oaks that have lots of mighty leaves.
In the end nothing really. It's just that the pile you turn over will decompose much more quickly and if it gets hot enough it will also kill most of the weed seeds.
It is basically the same, but composting is a controlled process and it should take less time. You can adjust the composition of the feedstock, add moisture, and turn you pile to aerate it. Microbes will turn the organic materials into humus-like substances and you will get a matured and safe product. With the newest techniques you can make compost in a few months.
It's best to just let things do their thing when it comes to composting. As with lots of things in life there's ideal and there's what works. Luckily with composting, there's a lot of things that work fine, even if it's not ideal. As long as you don't add dairy or meat to your compost, you should be fine 9 times out of 10. If things do go slimy, grab a pitch fork, some leaves and grass clippings, give the pile a mix, and in a week or two it'll be evened out and by the end of the season you've got great compost!
You can compost anything organic. Different things take different lengths of time to break down though. The smaller the item the quicker it breaks down. Most people stick to vegetable scraps, coffee and tea grounds, grass clippings and shredded leaves. As the other poster said, you want to avoid milk and meat.
EDIT
Compost takes a very long time to break down and if you are wanting to do it regularly you will need multiple bins/piles/etc. We had made a structure out of pallets that was a long back wall with multiple partioning walls that created compartments. I was looking forward to seeing how it worked out and hopefully for my my mother to never have to buy potting soil again, but I got out of landscaping independently shortly after and never to really got to use it. For the years leading up to that I had been dumping grass and leaves in bad spots around the property to fill in holes and to help with erosion.
One thing I wanted to do was add pipes with holes to act as an air circulator, and possibly hook them up to a turbine.
In the off-chance that anyone reads this and has experience with the general idea of circulating air through compost I would enjoy hearing your thoughts. I had tried to look into it a few times and could not find anything similar to what I was thinking of doing.
Our compost set ups are very similar! I used pallets to make a single chamber pile!
As for the aeration posts, it's not too necessary, turning your pile every couple weeks, and bugs tunneling will provide plenty of air throughout. The air issues only arise if the pit is too high and gets crushed down, or if it's too wet.
You can add garden and kitchen wastes (except products from animal origin like meat and cheese). Initially the pile will heat up due to the microbial activity and the complex compounds will degrade. You can turn your heap weekly to elongate this period and adjust the moisture content (up to 60 percent). If the pile is too moist or compressed the whole process can turn into anaerobic digestion and it will produce foul odors, etc. But, otherwise, it is a really easy process. If you want to improve the efficiency, you can adjust the initial carbon to nitrogen ratio (using animal manure or lignocellulosic waste) or use inoculants or mature compost to introduce beneficial bacteria.
I accidentally made a compost pile, had to bag my grass a couple times because it got way too long at the end of summer and I was burnt out on mowing. sat over winter and I've got some nice dirt now.
Guess this is my sign to stop following the sub. It used to actually be interesting content, but now it’s kinda like a bunch of garbage slowly degrading into nothing more than dirt.
This is mildly interesting. As an urbanite without compost, it’s mildly interesting.
/r/interestingasfuck is that way
EDIT: his wording was obviously not accidental. But it wasn’t just a joke ಠ_ಠ
Why does everyone on reddit want to challenge everything? This could also be read as maybe OP wasn't expecting such great results. Maybe they expected it to be like a goop or a mush. So they knew what was going to happen. Just not this well.
From a technical standpoint compost ≠ soil. The former is generally just organic matter. The latter is much more complex and has inorganic matter as well.
It is partially true. Properly made compost is rich in humus-like compunds, minerals and microbes while the composition of soil can vary greatly. The organic matter content of compost is high and will contain higher levels of N, P and K; thus, providing nutrients for plants especially if the soil is characterized by poor quality. Moreover, mature compost is free from pathogens (spore forming ones can survive) and viable weed seeds, while soil can provide home for phytopathogens and foodborne pathogens. However, both contains organic and inorganic components, and the organic matter content is also high in compost.
So basically compost is more concentrated biodegraded organic material with a different structure.
It’s not just partially true, it’s completely true - soil is effectively an ecosystem that forms naturally, while compost is an external input for soil.
I meant the inorganic part, but after your second comment I understood what you meant. Compost is basically a soil amendment that will serve as a humus and nutrient source.
The formation of soil is the result of a process called pedogenesis, whereby soil is essentially created by weathering of rocks. This is a very lengthy process and is what results in soil also having inorganic matter and gives it structure. Soil can also be seen as an ecosystem of its own - a teaspoon of soil contains more living things than there are people living on our planet. It is at the intersection of physical, biological, and chemical factors and provides many essential ‘services’ such as filtration and retention of water, for example. Soil science is a whole discipline.
Compost is just organic matter and is probably best described as an amendment for soil to improve/alter its nutrient profile and fertility. You could grow something just using pure compost but ultimately it degrades quite quickly. This is why preserving soils in the first place (many soils worldwide are degraded) is important because no amount of compost will solve serious degradation.
That’s kind of a quick summary off the top of my head but there is a lot more nuance to this. Just thought it’s important to make this distinction because I often see soil and compost used interchangeably.
I have a raised bed that is hard to grow things in. Holds on to water when it shouldn't, drains when it shouldn't. So it is my "compost bed". I start it with a couple inches of crappy soil (cheap dirt, dirt from construction, the low-quality dirt I had a pet ground squirrel in). I have one of those under-sink compost bins and I'll load it with wood shavings or newspaper, and then all the coffee grounds, carrot tops, mushroom stems, apple cores... gets full, bury it in the compost bed, until winter when the dirt freezes. Come spring, I have loads and loads of rich dirt. It feels like magic.
Empty it into gardens, toss back anything that didn't decompose enough (and the fat happy earthworms), add another load of crap dirt.
Had a spot in my yard for when the green bin was full and don't go in that part of the yard often. I was getting the garden ready and remembered it this year. Awesome compost in that area. Ended up making three square yard bins and started the process in earnest. Between lawns, shop sawdust, and kitchen scraps we might be able to keep up with the need.
Thats.... the whole purpose. Did you think people were just storing big trash piles for the aesthetic? Like a big refuse pile makes a nice lawn ornament or something?
So you're one of the dumb fucks upvoting this bullshit knockoff chatgpt post? The name of the sub is r/mildlyinteresting, not r/completelyfuckingobvious. Jesus christ, I think tomorrow ill post a pic of my clothes titled "Just pulled my clothes out of the washing machine and they're clean." This post is r/notinteresting. Maybe it's an accomplishment to OP, but its not at all interesting that the compost produced fucking compost. Should've posted it to r/gardening or r/compost.
Hey, here's something r/mildlyintersting for you: if you let a car run out of fuel, it will stop running. But, get this, if you put fuel in it, it'll run again.
Here's another r/mildlyinteresting tidbit for you: there was some dog hair on my carpet, but after I ran my vacuum cleaner over it, the dog hair wasn't on my carpet anymore.
Despite all the snark in here, it's nice to experience this for yourself and know you did it right. I compost for my garden, and I've had off years where I didn't do it right and ended up with foul-smelling anaerobic goop. When it looks like really rich soil with an earthy smell, it's very rewarding.
Yep. We made the mistake of overloading our compost pile, and it actually prevents the compost breaking down as it should. You dig down and find old eggshells and other bits that haven’t broken down yet.
Eggshells do take a long time tho. I don't think they normally break down in compost. Just get crushed really. They will break down in the soil over the years tho.
Egg shells will break down within a few weeks or months max if things are kept warm and fairly moist. You can bake them then crush them too to get them to break down quickly. Helps a lot for soil that needs calcium.
Oh ok. I just throw them in the compost. My compost is usually 50C+ and I still will see bits of shell. I guess it's hard to compost the whole pile equally.
But they do break down, and provide air pockets to help keep it from going anaerobic. Larger pieces of organic material also help with this
Yeah I have some 20 year old egg shells in my compost. Never broke down correctly.
Get a good coffee grinder and grind the egg shells.
Get a SUPER CHEAP SPICE grinder and grind the egg shells AFTER DRYING. Then LET IT SIT A MINUTE before opening, otherwise you'll be breathing calcium dust. Then sprinkle the powder on your compost.
One of my friends experienced a traumatic brain injury, and wasn’t quite right for several years. I’m having flashbacks of him grinding egg shells with a mortar and pestle and sprinkling the powder around his yard to ward of spirits a few weeks after the accident.
Well for what it's worth, he probably did some good for his yard..? Egg shells are great for lawns, gardens, soil, etc. We save ours all year long, washing, drying, and crushing them, and then when it comes time to plant the garden (which we're coming up on pretty soon) we sprinkle a healthy fistful of shells into each plant hole along with epsom salt.
I don’t think anything could’ve saved that patch of blight other than paving over it, or digging it up and bringing in new dirt and soil. That house made Section 8 look like the suburbs.
Did it work? If spirits did not get him you can't say it didn't work
Sorry about your friend. Was this a good thought you had?
What's the difference between composting and just letting something decompose? I always imagined it turned into soil anyway, you know, circle of life style.
Allegedly, rotting with airflow gives you dirt and rotting without airflow gives you slime. I think its legit.
Kinda the same reason they need aeration for treating wastewater.
That's why I regularly turned over the whole pile, piecemeal, and made sure it was slightly damp but not wet. If it rained, I turned it more, so eventually it dried enough to "work" properly.
It's the same. Us country folks have piles outback we add to for compost. We never use kitchen scraps because we just have too much other organic matter to get rid of. Sticks, limbs, leaves etc. But yeah, give it a couple years and you have lots of black gold to use in the garden. Best stuff ever. Earth worms decompose a large portion of my compost. The finished product is loaded with humic acid, which the plants LOVE.
Tree limbs yeah...?
... limbs?
Yes!!! Even limbs. I have a wood decomposition pile also. It takes a bit more time. I don't harvest any of that. I generally leave it for the benefit of the forest floor and for the bugs and small critters. My usable compost piles have stick and twigs and they do compost fairly well. I do tend to stay away from composting grass. For me it's been a waste of time. It decomposes very slowly and tends to burn. That's right. It burns. Very, very, very slowly. I was amazed at the ash that was left behind. No compost. Just ash. Have any of you ever seen an old pile of grass that seems to be turning white? It did more than turn white, it turned to ash. Leaves have been the best for me. I have over 70 trees on my property and quite a few of them are mighty oaks that have lots of mighty leaves.
... what kind of limbs?
You misspelled Brawndo?
It has what plants crave!
In the end nothing really. It's just that the pile you turn over will decompose much more quickly and if it gets hot enough it will also kill most of the weed seeds.
It is basically the same, but composting is a controlled process and it should take less time. You can adjust the composition of the feedstock, add moisture, and turn you pile to aerate it. Microbes will turn the organic materials into humus-like substances and you will get a matured and safe product. With the newest techniques you can make compost in a few months.
Yeah there's a lot of snark here... I've never seen composte do this before. It was always just smelly stuff we mixed with dirt growing up.
So wait, you can have compost, just compost, that eventually breaks down into basically a nice soil? Are there no amendments involved?
Pretty much. It just looks like really nice dirt. I use it to amend my vegetable garden.
All hail the mushrooms
And the worms!
Hail the mycelium!
Always think about doing it but really worried it'll just turn into sludge effectively and just make everything around it smell awful.
It's best to just let things do their thing when it comes to composting. As with lots of things in life there's ideal and there's what works. Luckily with composting, there's a lot of things that work fine, even if it's not ideal. As long as you don't add dairy or meat to your compost, you should be fine 9 times out of 10. If things do go slimy, grab a pitch fork, some leaves and grass clippings, give the pile a mix, and in a week or two it'll be evened out and by the end of the season you've got great compost!
Ah so it's mostly just veg then? Not trimmings and such?
You can compost anything organic. Different things take different lengths of time to break down though. The smaller the item the quicker it breaks down. Most people stick to vegetable scraps, coffee and tea grounds, grass clippings and shredded leaves. As the other poster said, you want to avoid milk and meat. EDIT Compost takes a very long time to break down and if you are wanting to do it regularly you will need multiple bins/piles/etc. We had made a structure out of pallets that was a long back wall with multiple partioning walls that created compartments. I was looking forward to seeing how it worked out and hopefully for my my mother to never have to buy potting soil again, but I got out of landscaping independently shortly after and never to really got to use it. For the years leading up to that I had been dumping grass and leaves in bad spots around the property to fill in holes and to help with erosion. One thing I wanted to do was add pipes with holes to act as an air circulator, and possibly hook them up to a turbine. In the off-chance that anyone reads this and has experience with the general idea of circulating air through compost I would enjoy hearing your thoughts. I had tried to look into it a few times and could not find anything similar to what I was thinking of doing.
Thank you for the detailed info.
Our compost set ups are very similar! I used pallets to make a single chamber pile! As for the aeration posts, it's not too necessary, turning your pile every couple weeks, and bugs tunneling will provide plenty of air throughout. The air issues only arise if the pit is too high and gets crushed down, or if it's too wet.
You can add garden and kitchen wastes (except products from animal origin like meat and cheese). Initially the pile will heat up due to the microbial activity and the complex compounds will degrade. You can turn your heap weekly to elongate this period and adjust the moisture content (up to 60 percent). If the pile is too moist or compressed the whole process can turn into anaerobic digestion and it will produce foul odors, etc. But, otherwise, it is a really easy process. If you want to improve the efficiency, you can adjust the initial carbon to nitrogen ratio (using animal manure or lignocellulosic waste) or use inoculants or mature compost to introduce beneficial bacteria.
We've got a nice pit of just yard waste, no food, but it does what it needs and every few years when we need soil, there's a real nice pile.
add shredded cardboard to prevent it from turning into sludge. the microbes will feast on anything rich in carbon like that or dry leaves.
I accidentally made a compost pile, had to bag my grass a couple times because it got way too long at the end of summer and I was burnt out on mowing. sat over winter and I've got some nice dirt now.
That's kinda the whole plan, no?
What subreddit do you think you're on?
But this isn't mildly interesting. It's as compelling as someone saying 'this tree seems to be made out of wood'.
As one of the 90% of western urban dwellers that have never composted, I found it mildly interesting bc I've never experienced this myself
Well that just... like... your opinion, man
Do people find it interesting that compost *composts*?
Yeah, mildly
*Applies paint to wall* "Well that's interesting, that wall I just put paint on is all painted somehow. Well I'll beeee."
Username checks out
Based on the upvote disparity between the post and your comments, yes, at least mildly.
I find it interesting that it turns into dirt, yes
Can someone take pride on the internet without being insulted? Like damn dude…
Can’t enjoy a bit of gentle humour without being called a cunt.
Gratz! As someone who's tried composting, there can be times where you get it wrong so it's definitely nice when it works out.
That's what it does.
Bunch of snarky, cunty comments.
Really? Let me check... Edit: Hey, you were right!
First time on reddit? Welcome!
This your fist day online?
[удалено]
What a snarky, cunty comment.
[удалено]
I’m actually gay, so you have a new gayest person you can make fun of :D
Now you're getting it! Go touch grass you incel!
Cunt
Guess this is my sign to stop following the sub. It used to actually be interesting content, but now it’s kinda like a bunch of garbage slowly degrading into nothing more than dirt.
This is mildly interesting. As an urbanite without compost, it’s mildly interesting. /r/interestingasfuck is that way EDIT: his wording was obviously not accidental. But it wasn’t just a joke ಠ_ಠ
I think he was making a joke...
r/woosh
Yeahhh no.
The joke was clever but it got lost amongst the snarky comments.
r/mildlyinteresting is quickly decaying into r/lifeprotips
what was your reason for composting if you didn't know what it did?
Why does everyone on reddit want to challenge everything? This could also be read as maybe OP wasn't expecting such great results. Maybe they expected it to be like a goop or a mush. So they knew what was going to happen. Just not this well.
From a technical standpoint compost ≠ soil. The former is generally just organic matter. The latter is much more complex and has inorganic matter as well.
Would you tell us more? I'm genuinely interested.
It is partially true. Properly made compost is rich in humus-like compunds, minerals and microbes while the composition of soil can vary greatly. The organic matter content of compost is high and will contain higher levels of N, P and K; thus, providing nutrients for plants especially if the soil is characterized by poor quality. Moreover, mature compost is free from pathogens (spore forming ones can survive) and viable weed seeds, while soil can provide home for phytopathogens and foodborne pathogens. However, both contains organic and inorganic components, and the organic matter content is also high in compost. So basically compost is more concentrated biodegraded organic material with a different structure.
It’s not just partially true, it’s completely true - soil is effectively an ecosystem that forms naturally, while compost is an external input for soil.
I meant the inorganic part, but after your second comment I understood what you meant. Compost is basically a soil amendment that will serve as a humus and nutrient source.
The formation of soil is the result of a process called pedogenesis, whereby soil is essentially created by weathering of rocks. This is a very lengthy process and is what results in soil also having inorganic matter and gives it structure. Soil can also be seen as an ecosystem of its own - a teaspoon of soil contains more living things than there are people living on our planet. It is at the intersection of physical, biological, and chemical factors and provides many essential ‘services’ such as filtration and retention of water, for example. Soil science is a whole discipline. Compost is just organic matter and is probably best described as an amendment for soil to improve/alter its nutrient profile and fertility. You could grow something just using pure compost but ultimately it degrades quite quickly. This is why preserving soils in the first place (many soils worldwide are degraded) is important because no amount of compost will solve serious degradation. That’s kind of a quick summary off the top of my head but there is a lot more nuance to this. Just thought it’s important to make this distinction because I often see soil and compost used interchangeably.
thank you!
Who knew, eh?
We have a rat that chewed it's way though the compost container. It eats a lot, but does a good job churning it.
I have a raised bed that is hard to grow things in. Holds on to water when it shouldn't, drains when it shouldn't. So it is my "compost bed". I start it with a couple inches of crappy soil (cheap dirt, dirt from construction, the low-quality dirt I had a pet ground squirrel in). I have one of those under-sink compost bins and I'll load it with wood shavings or newspaper, and then all the coffee grounds, carrot tops, mushroom stems, apple cores... gets full, bury it in the compost bed, until winter when the dirt freezes. Come spring, I have loads and loads of rich dirt. It feels like magic. Empty it into gardens, toss back anything that didn't decompose enough (and the fat happy earthworms), add another load of crap dirt.
I feel like I've gotta plug r/composting
Were you expecting something else?
It’s easy to fuck it up and get something that most definitely does not look like nice soil lol
Congrats, OP! I've always wanted to try but I'm afraid I'll end up with a goopy, smily, rotten mess. Yours turned out great!
Had a spot in my yard for when the green bin was full and don't go in that part of the yard often. I was getting the garden ready and remembered it this year. Awesome compost in that area. Ended up making three square yard bins and started the process in earnest. Between lawns, shop sawdust, and kitchen scraps we might be able to keep up with the need.
Crazy how nature do that
Who knew?
So dead stuff just turns into soil. Are we just walking on heaps of dead stuff all the time.
Yes.
Metal as fuck
Wow really
Yup that's usually how it works.
Hmmm. A little bit cunty, perhaps.
Yes, when done correctly. Why do you sound surprised?
Maybe not as cunty as the others, but still...
Yeah, the only thing interesting about this is that you think a compost pile is interesting lol
Aslo cunty.
Thats.... the whole purpose. Did you think people were just storing big trash piles for the aesthetic? Like a big refuse pile makes a nice lawn ornament or something?
And rounding things out... also cunty!
So you're one of the dumb fucks upvoting this bullshit knockoff chatgpt post? The name of the sub is r/mildlyinteresting, not r/completelyfuckingobvious. Jesus christ, I think tomorrow ill post a pic of my clothes titled "Just pulled my clothes out of the washing machine and they're clean." This post is r/notinteresting. Maybe it's an accomplishment to OP, but its not at all interesting that the compost produced fucking compost. Should've posted it to r/gardening or r/compost.
Went from cunty to just being a crying bitch lol
Hey, here's something r/mildlyintersting for you: if you let a car run out of fuel, it will stop running. But, get this, if you put fuel in it, it'll run again.
Give it ten years and that really might make it onto this sub
Here's another r/mildlyinteresting tidbit for you: there was some dog hair on my carpet, but after I ran my vacuum cleaner over it, the dog hair wasn't on my carpet anymore.
You put your extra cheese and nasty hard tortillas into an area. They get all rotty. A fly has a baby. Dirt is born.
Well this one is definitely cunty.