How to Speed up Your Compost: 17 Strategies to Try
Composting is a great method for recycling organic matter. Instead of throwing food scraps, garden clippings, and fall leaves away, you can turn them into compost! If your pile is slow-acting, longtime composter Jerad Bryant shares these 17 strategies for speeding up the process.
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What is compost? It’s a way for gardeners to replicate natural decomposition processes in their backyard. In forests, leaves, plants, and dead animals accumulate on the floor. Worms, microbes, and other organisms eat the dead materials and turn them into fertile, absorbent particles. These particles make up humus, a valuable soil material.
Though composting is excellent for the environment, it can sometimes be a slow-working process. Temperature, moisture, and airflow influence how well and quickly the composting process works. Keep these levels at the right spot, and you’ll speed up your compost pile’s decomposition in no time.
Though there are 17 strategies to speed up your pile, it’s best to start with one or two and see how they affect your compost. After experimenting, you’ll know exactly what to do to create a non-smelly, quick-working, and efficient compost pile.
Turn More Frequently
Composting needs three things to work well: airflow, moisture, and a balance of organic materials. Without the proper ratios of all three, the piles may work slowly or not at all. In order to speed up the composting process, you must balance these three factors.
Turning is an easy way to boost aeration in existing piles. Simply grab a pitchfork, push it in the center, and turn the waste over on itself. Daily turning is best for quick working piles; they’ll decompose slowly if you turn less often than every day.
Boost Aeration
Turning increases airflow to your pile, but there are other ingenious ways to accomplish this. One new trick involves PVC pipes and a drill. Grab a straight PVC pipe, drill holes throughout its length, then stab it in the pile’s center. The pipe will help air reach the bottom without the need for daily turning.
Another easy way to boost aeration is with a bottom layer of branches or logs. The thick chunks allow air to enter through the pile’s bottom, reducing the need for daily turning. Untreated pallets also work well for this purpose.
Create Air Pockets
Air is crucial throughout the entire pile! Though large chunks and PVC pipe help to some degree, the types of materials you put in your piles also influence the amount of air.
Boost airflow in the piles’ interiors by adding porous materials like biochar, perlite, pumice, or vermiculite. They’ll create air and water pockets for microbes and soil critters to access while they decompose your organic waste.
Moderate Moisture
Alongside airflow and a good balance of organic materials, moisture levels are crucial for a quick decomposition process. You want your pile to have 50% moisture—it should feel like a wrung-out sponge when you grasp a clump.
As the seasons change, how much water you’ll need to add will also change. Piles need more moisture during hot, dry seasons and less during cool, wet ones. Test the compost’s moisture content before adding more water to avoid sogginess.
Make a Larger Pile
A part of moderating moisture levels depends on how large or small your setup is. Larger piles are easier to maintain than smaller ones, as they have more insulation and room for microbes. They have more volume than surface area compared to small piles, meaning they lose less heat under the same conditions.
Though large piles are the most efficient way to compost, they can be difficult to turn. How big to make it depends on you and your needs—if you can lift heavy chunks, aim for a pile three feet long, wide, and tall.
Increase the Heat
Like moisture and airflow, temperature is also important for the decomposition processes. Composting organisms are most active between 90-140°F (32-60°C). The inner parts stay this warm for most of the process, as they have insulation from the outer layers. With daily turning, you ensure all objects reach this internal temperature range.
There are some tricks you can use to help boost the heat. Straw, grass clippings, and fall leaves are the perfect insulators. Simply pile thick layers of the stuff on your piles, ensuring you cover each part. To turn the pile, remove the insulation and turn as usual. Then, place it back on top until outdoor temperatures warm in spring and summer.
Another way to increase the heat is with a proper location. Though partial shade is best for quick decomposition rates, more sunlight may be beneficial in cold zones. Situate your piles under direct sunlight in the winter, and keep them sufficiently moist to maintain a proper temperature. Then, as the days warm, move the pile back to partial shade for the remainder of the growing season.
Balance Greens and Browns
Greens and browns are the two organic materials you need. Greens are waste products rich in nitrogen, while browns are those rich in carbon. You want to maintain a perfect balance to avoid sogginess while you feed the microbes.
Add one shovelful of green materials for every two to three shovelfuls of brown materials. This creates a balanced ratio of 1:2 or 1:3 parts green waste to brown waste. You may layer the different types like a lasagna, or mix them evenly for a balanced distribution.
Here’s a table with common greens and browns and their carbon-to-nitrogen ratios.
| Carbon-Rich Browns | Carbon:Nitrogen Ratio | Nitrogen-Rich Greens | Carbon:Nitrogen Ratio |
| Fallen leaves | 30-80:1 | Kitchen scraps | 15-20:1 |
| Straw | 40-100:1 | Fleshy plant waste | 15-25:1 |
| Wood chips and sawdust | 100-500:1 | Grass clippings | 15-25:1 |
| Chemical-free paper products | 150-550:1 | Manure | 5-25:1 |
Hot Compost
There’s more than one way to compost! Hot composting is an efficient way to quickly transform organic waste into a valuable soil product, humus. Because of the high heat it generates, it manages to kill weed seeds and diseases. This leads to a disease-free soil product for amending your beds.
To make hot compost, create a pile that’s three feet wide, long, and tall. Add browns and greens in a balanced ratio, then water the pile so it’s moist and not soggy. With daily turning, you can have a finished soil product in two to three weeks!
Leave Wood in the Garden
Though wood is organic matter, it’s not the best material for composting. Wood sucks up nitrogen as it initially breaks down, causing a nutrient imbalance in the pile. Though logs and branches are great for creating a bottom layer that facilitates airflow, they’re not ideal for mixing in with the other waste materials. They’ll slow down the decomposition process.
The best spot for wood debris is in your garden. Simply place it on the soil and let nature’s processes take hold. Fungi, wood-boring insects, and microbes will eat it up, turning the wood into humus over time.
Shred Waste
Every composter should practice this strategy! Shredding your waste before adding it can help it break down quickly. Rather than relying on worms and microbes to eat large particles, you’ll do half the work for them!
The best materials to shred are paper products, long plant stems, and fall leaves. Clip them into small pieces with pruners or scissors, or push them through a chipper if you have one.
Freeze Food Scraps
Freezing is another trick for speeding up this process with little effort. Simply place food scraps in a bag or container in the freezer. The freezing process ruptures the organic matter’s cell walls; as it warms up, it’s readily available for worms, soil critters, and microbes.
Freezing isn’t just helpful for the microbes—it also eliminates rotten odors! If you have a smelly bin under your kitchen sink, consider making room in the freezer for your scraps. Your nose will thank you!
Add Compost Activators
Activators speed up the process by introducing beneficial microbes to the site. Rather than waiting for the ones from your soil to creep into the pile, you can inoculate it with microbes that commercial composters use.
EM-1 is a perfect activator for home composters. It contains many units of microbes that eat dead things and turn them into humus. If you have a slow or inactive pile, consider adding an activator like EM-1 to speed it up.
Add Worms
Worms are essential in composting systems! If you have a system that sits on the ground, you most likely already have dozens of worms working for you. Worms are especially beneficial in aboveground systems that don’t touch your garden’s soil, like tumblers or square bins.
Rather than regular composting, you can also choose to vermicompost! Vermicompost is a term for composting in a closed system where worms do more work than the microbes. It creates a nutrient-dense amendment called worm castings. Set up one yourself, or consider adding a worm bag or bin to your setup.
Add Garden Soil
Rather than buying activators or worms, you can inoculate your piles with native garden soil! Garden soil is full of bacteria, fungi, and archaea that are beneficial for composting. Blending a shovelful or two in your piles is a great way to introduce the microbes to the waste.
You can also inoculate the piles with finished compost. I like to keep some of my old piles in place and add more waste to them to create new ones. You may use finished compost, garden soil, or a combination of the two.
Try Bokashi Composting
Bokashi is a funky word for a cool process! Rather than dumping raw waste into your piles, you’ll pre-compost it in your kitchen before moving it outdoors. Bokashi relies on bacteria that ferment the waste so that it decomposes quickly in the environment. It creates a compost-like material that you can break down further.
The benefit of Bokashi composting is that it reduces the size of your waste and eliminates putrid odors. It also reduces the time it takes for waste to decompose into humus. Try it today with Bokashi bran and a homemade bucket, or find a bucket specifically designed for Bokashi composting.
Use a Machine
New technology has revolutionized composting—systems like the Lomi composter can turn raw food scraps into tiny particles in a single day! It works with grinding, temperature control, and pressure. Simply stuff your scraps in the machine, turn it on, and wait for the process to finish. Then, put the organic matter into your garden to decompose further.
Though machines are nifty and efficient, they’re often expensive. They’re not essential to make compost, and there are ways to reduce smells without a machine. Turn your piles daily, maintain even moisture, and balance the green-brown ratios. This should keep odors down and facilitate a quick breakdown of the waste.
Harvest Early
The last strategy of this list is more of a cheat! Instead of waiting for the waste to break down fully, you can remove it and put it in your garden to decompose further. This isn’t a good solution if your piles have rotting waste in them, though it works well near the end of the process when everything is almost completely decomposed.
Another trick is to lightly till the waste into the garden soil so it has access to more microbes and worms. They’ll continue decomposing your browns and greens, giving you valuable humus in your garden beds quicker than if you had waited for the piles to finish working.
