People ALWAYS fuckin over-complicate compost. You don’t need a recipe, you don’t need to turn it or water it or whateverthefuck, you just. Pile shit up and let it rot.
Steps of composting;
1. Pile up organic stuff. Manure, food scraps, sticks, whatever. Throw all that shit in a pile.
2. Throw a couple shovelfuls of soil on there. (The soil contains all sorts of good nematodes and bacteria and fungi and all the other Good Bois that rot organics down.)
Now just…leave it alone. Throw more waste on there as it accumulates. Ignore. Don’t fuckin worry, my dudes, just leave it be. The Rot Squad has it from here.
After a year, move all the half-composted stuff on top aside to Pile #2, and lo and behold, what was once chicken manure, orange peels, moldy bread, and coffee grounds is now rich black humus. If there’s any chunks of stick or corn cob or whatever in there, just pick ‘em out and chuck them on Pile #2. Use the compost as you wish.
Now, will this sterilize any seeds in there? Fuck no. You could start a whole garden from a shovelful of my compost. Tomato seed, columbine seed, squash, blanketflower, nicotiana, echinacia, about thirty types of grass, raspberry, sunflower, strawberry, hyssop, and who knows what else.
So that’s why you spread the compost around plants, and then top it off with some more mulch, which will shade out any germinating seeds. Or plop it in planting holes.
The mulch will also rot down over time into MORE nice rich humus.
Next year, rake back the half-composted junk from pile #2, plop it back on pile #1, and repeat forever.
And if you’re just on shitty clay or sand?
COMPOST COMPOST COMPOST. MORE COMPOST MOAR COMPOST. Tilling compost into clay will absolutely transform your soil. Sand, the same.
Most local landfills will ALSO have a compost heap, and that, like mulch, will ALSO be available for cheap to free. Load up on that sweet black gold, and start a compost heap.
Don’t you need to have a certain ratio in the stuff you’re throwing in there, though? I vaguely remember the number 25:1 in terms of the amount of food waste and stuff you’re throwing in versus the amount of yard material like sticks and leaves, but I don’t know if the addition of pre formed soil changes that or not.
Nope fuckit it all rots down anyway.
Those ratios make it rot faster is all, but ain’t nobody got time to be out here mixing compost precisely.
Is there any reason I can’t do this in a ditch? The backyard used to have a broken in ground pool when we moved in so we tore it out and filled it in with construction site dirt, but it formed a two foot deep, eight feet long not-really-sinkhole because it wasn’t packed down very well. Can’t I just…throw the compost things into it and fill it up while forming some nice usable dirt?
Not a one. That would actually trap water and make it work even better.
Not so long as you don’t put meat or dairy on it.