When Should One Choose Cold Composting vs Hot Composting?

Cold composting is a great alternative if you cannot accumulate enough organic waste all at once to create a hot compost pile, or if you aren’t interested in the physical task of turning a compost pile.. or if you have plenty of space and don’t need the compost in a hurry. You don’t need much to start the process of cold composting. The cold compost pile builds gradually as materials come to hand.

Disadvantages of Cold Composting

Although the feeding process when cold composting is less demanding, the results take a long time. You can wait from 6 months to a year for a batch of compost to be produced by this method.

It depends on what goes into the pile: soft “greens” like grass clippings and kitchen wastes break down much faster than woody “browns” or unshredded pieces.

Advantages of Cold Composting:

The biggest advantage of cold composting is that no turning is required. Pile the material in a corner or in a home made pen and the material will eventually decompose. But it’s a good idea to build the pile around an air stack, or to poke it with an aerator tool occasionally to help it along.

General Hints for Cold Composting

First: As with a hot compost, cold piles should be kept moist, and they do need a variety of food material for the decomposer organisms to prosper.

Second: The lower layers decompose first because new material is constantly being added to the top. A compost container isn’t necessary, but it may help you get at the finished stuff on the bottom.

Third: Whatever you choose — a fancy container or a pile in the corner of the yard — compost produced slowly will need to be covered or a lot of its nutrients will be “weathered away” over time. Using a tarp to cover the composting pile is a good idea.

If you don’t protect your composting pile from the weather elements, especially heavy rains, the resulting material will still be valuable as a soil conditioner, but it will not be very effective as a fertilizer.

In the following posts, I will cover the different ways you can cold compost.

Until then, stay healthy!

Marcie

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 9:51 pm and is filed under Cold Composting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.