Slow or Cold Composting—The No Work Way
To Make Compost

With slow or cold composting, you can just pile grass clippings and dry leaves on the ground or in a bin. This method requires no maintenance, but it will take several months to a year or more for the pile to decompose.

Cold composting works well if you don't have the time needed to tend the compost pile at least every other day, if have little yard waste, and if you're not in a hurry to use the compost.

Keep weeds and diseased plants out of the mix since the temperatures reached with this type of composting will not be high enough to kill the seeds and disease-causing organisms.

With a slower rate of decomposition, there's a higher risk of pests digging up buried wastes.

Creating Your Compost Pile

There's no turning involved in cold composting, but the pile still needs oxygen to keep the aerobic microbes working.

So build your pile around an air stack.

If you don't have something to bring air in, you'll need to poke holes in it with a piece of rebar or a stout branch.

Add yard waste as you have it. Shredding or chopping speeds up the process.

To quickly shred material, run your lawn mower over small piles of weeds and trimmings.

And be sure to cover the pile. If you don't, most of the nutrients will leach away as water passes through the pile. While the remaining compost will be an excellent soil amendment or conditioner, it won't do much as an organic fertilizer.

Cold composting has been shown to be better at suppressing soil-borne diseases (as opposed to plant diseases introduced to the compost pile itself) than hot composting.

It also leaves many more small bits of organic material that aren't decomposed yet. Those bits can be screened out if desired, or leave them in and let them continue to decompose while in the soil. (You may need extra nitrogen in the soil to continue brown matter decomposition.)

A few examples of cold or slow composting are sheet, trench, cold bin, and heap composting.

It's also possible to use cold composting to develop organic matter throughout the yard. Create cold heaps wherever you need rich compost—under trees and shrubs, in beaten up places, in the area that will be a future season's garden, and so on. Over the period of a year or two, the content will decay, introducing beneficial organic matter into the soil.

Portions of this article are courtesy of the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

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