Composting

I am not sure that I'll be able to keep it up through the winter. It's getting awfully hard to find a place to put new stuff. But then, I thought that at one point last winter, and still I managed. If I were to start using my other compost pile, I'd have to guess at where it is because it's completely covered by snow.

 

I had to add a few boxes and yard bags full of compost to my old compost pile because I couldn't fit anymore on this one for a while. If they are still intact in the spring, I'll move them over to this pile. However, with a week and a half of above freezing weather, it dropped enough that I am adding stuff to the top of this compost pile again. It's pretty high though, and right now we are having the coldest weather of the winter, that being below zero weather, not counting wind chill.

 

For a while, I couldn't fit anything more onto this pile but the week and a half of above-freezing weather we had, as well as the rain, shrunk it down some, so I've been adding new stuff here again, on the edges since I can't reach the top.


When I couldn't fit anything else on my compost pile, I had to add some new stuff to my old pile. If it still seems feasible later, I may move this over to the other pile. I was hoping to dismantle this one in the spring, and build a new one with a concrete foundation and wire walls. Beneath the bags and boxes that I added only a few weeks ago, everything is pretty well composted.

 

I am starting a new compost pile this year, too. I need to put a fence around it to hold stuff in; but it has been too cold to do much of anything out in the yard so far this year. I have a small corner of the yard that is covered in pine needles from the neighbor's pine trees, plus small cedar needles from our cedar tree. Instead of bagging them and getting rid of the needles, this year I am going to put them into the compost and see how that works. I put the pile under where the rainspout from the back gutter comes down, so they will get soaked when we do get rain, and that should help it to break down into compost with the help of our food scraps and grass clippings.
I like your idea of putting things in the cardboard boxes and letting it decompose along with the organics that we put on the compost pile, and this would be a good way to dispose of the Amazon boxes we get.

 

Please let us know how it works out. It should work out well for you, as each box is its own micro-ecosystem, and air is allowed to circulate in the center.

 

It'll collapse soon, hopefully inward.

 

For the time being, there is a layer of thick ice that allows me to walk on top of the snow piled on the side of it. By the time that melts, I expect the pile will be collapsing anyhow. Not only is there a good chance that some composting has been going on in the middle of the pile over the winter, but a lot of what is there is layer upon layer of snow and ice that I have stacked boxes on.

 

If spring every makes it to Maine, that is. We have still had very few days that were more than a couple of degrees above freezing. I guess we did have a week or so, but we've had some big storms since then.