You are doing about all you can but with cool tempature the process is rather slow. I suggest not bothering to turn so often. It won't hurt the pile but it also won;t help much either until weather warms a little and/or a larger precent of pile is high in N. It will help if you can add some horse,chicken or cow manure. Not only will the manure bring in N,it supplies microbes that boost composting. Regardless of season, N/C ratio and other factors keeping material moist is important. Just browse old posts in this forum to get a feel for what others are doing. You will soon realize that most who have been composting for years take a more passive approach than those starting out. The norm is throwing surplus leaves in a corral as they are raked and doing nothing for 4 to 6 months when it might be turned. As long as you are having fun,have at it,otherwise it gets old,boring and cast aside.

Reasons for low heat could mean not enough browns, or the total pile is too small. The heat will be mainly in the middle part. When you turn you lose heat and you lose heat over time, and have to re add coffee grounds and wood is very good as a brown. In fact, the heat from coffee last not that long, and maybe its too wet due to urine. I don't think urine helps at all. I don't like chicken manure, its high in salt and I did try it once it did not help heat. You have to sort of keep trying different things. Its like baking, your first cake won't perfect, but you keep at it.

My compost bin (plastic, 30" diameter) is running coolish right now, about 70-80F, but full of red worms and I keep it moist. Every 2 weeks or so I add kitchen scraps (a half full 5 gal bucket), and the temperature will go up to 100F in the area where I put the scraps. It'll stay at 100F for up to a week and then go back down. If I add a lot of leaves and vegetable scraps, the temperature can reach 120-130 for longer, but that's as hot as this compost bin gets. Which is ok with me since I'm also growing red worms in it and they don't like it that hot(they just go down lower where it's cooler)..

BTW, the only time I turn the compost in this bin is when I add something to it, and I don't turn it too much. Sometimes I just open up a hole for the scraps, cover it up and water a bit. I think that turning your pile every few days when there isn't any heat building up...could be counterproductive.

If you have grass clippings, add lots of them and make sure they're wet. That always worked for me at my previous house, the grass would really heat up quickly, within a day or two.

What size is your bin? It is difficult to tell from the picture, but most everyone has a problem with the bacteria generating heat if the volume of material is too small. Another heat limiting factor is particle size, general the smaller the particles the faster the bacteria will digest them and the more heat they will generate.

yes, height is just as important as width.......think cube or cylinder shapes for hot piles........also that bin you have is not the best if you are encouraging aerobic bacteria..they need lots of oxygen...exposure to the elements would help with that...can the wooden box and get some chicken fencing. keep the compost in contact with the soil.

the other ingredients are fine, but leaves will not work in a hot compost pile. They are not browns like everyone says they are. Leaves have waxes and lignins and break down in the forest by molding; fungal. Largely anaerobic, Hot compost is aerobic and bacterial. for hot compost I want, manure and urine soaked animal bedding, fork it up, it aerates and explodes into heat, any time of year.

sorry sand- i hot compost with leaves all the time

Davids10...is that steaming pile 100% leaves? I have a compost pile with only oak leaves and pine needles and it doesn't heat up very much. In my other pile, a plastic compost bin, when I add 6 inches of oak leaves (that I've shredded in a leaf mulcher) on top of vegetable scraps and older compost, they will heat up nicely but I've never had steam. How do you get your pile going?

kimmsr
its a big bin. its not quite full. but, its pretty big.
just eyeballing it, i would say, it about 6ft by 4ft by 3ft

i read 3-foot square is minimum,
so, i try to keep it larger than that.
the bin isnt full, but, im pretty sure total area
is more than 3x3x3

i do remember reading if the pile is too small it wont heat up
but, i did have heat at one point.

greenthumbzdude
the reason i built one, is because when i first tried composting, it rained almost every day for a month.
New Orleans is one of the top cities in the USA for rainfall.

jbclem
great info
do you add grass clippings that are green, or, do i wait for them to turn brown first ?

i may be turning it too often at times
and the coffee ground might have broken down already.
i can add more grounds, i have plenty of those.

it was actually pretty dry
i just added a beer mixed with some water and an old bottle of cane syrup i was going to throw out.
im hoping the sugar and yeast will help.

also...
if anyone knows how i can get 100lb+ of coffee grounds to break down, let me know. i get them 50lb at a time from Starbucks
its a shame i cant use them though, they are still fresh.
i know i cant use too many in the pile, i made that mistake already.

thanks everyone

I had 160F in the bin this morning. :)

You just have to have the right mix. What works for me is ground up leaves, mostly magnolia, from last fall. DH runs them over several times with the mulching mower, so they're pretty finely ground. They are my browns. My greens this time of year are almost all coffee grounds from Starbucks. My bin is a cylinder about 3' diameter and 4' tall and it is filled almost to the top. It has a plastic wall around it with holes for air circulation. In this pile I used about 100 pounds of UCGs, and all the rest was leaves. (I also dumped in about a cup of org fert because the box was almost empty and it was annoying me sitting around. I also have added about 5 gallons of kitchen waste in about 1 gallon at a time over the last 10 days or so.) I wetted it down, and let it heat up for at least 48 hours without turning it. If you turn it too often, it won't heat up as much.

My bins are on aspalt, so I have to manage moisture carefully, but I've been doing it there for about 15 years, and over time I've worked the kinks out. In Seattle at this time of year, we get a lot of water falling out of the sky. My bins are partly under my house's eaves, and they have lids, but there are some small air holes in them. My latest improvement is to cover the pile with a piece of plastic before I put the lid on. I hadn't realized how much rain gets in there through those little holes. This has helped the pile from getting too wet, which will prevent it from getting hot.

My point is that you have to fine tune your system to make it work for you and your conditions. My general approach to a pile that won't heat is to add more greens, and that almost always does the trick. Sometimes it needs a little bit of water. Sometimes it just needs a day or two to get going. I have never had smaller piles heat up as much as larger ones. I have hit 160F before, but only when the bin is filled almost to the top, like mine is today. For a half full bin, the max temp is usually about 130-40F, but that is still hot enough to get the job done.

This post was edited by karchita on Sat, Jan 17, 15 at 3:46

Perhaps this about 17 minute video about composting Mike McGrath did at a TEDX meeting might help some.

Here is a link that might be useful: Mike McGrath on composting

as sand said leaves have both wax-for protection-and lignin-for rigidity. the lignin responds slowly to bacteria and the cuticle-the waxy covering needs to be broken up. i do it two ways. grind about half the leaves fairly fine-i use a rotary lawnmower- and mix with the whole leaves. getting the moisture right takes a little care as it takes a while for the leaves to hydrate. an all leaf heap heats more slowly than one with greens, for me a week to ten days. i haven't actually made an all leaf heap for a couple of years. this year's heap started with a garden cleanup heap-which had somes leaves in it-which heated to 160 in 3 days. once the heap was hot i started adding whole leaves-the heat and steam broke down the cuticle and supercharged bacterial breakdown of the lignin. if you are a compost whacko making a hot heap with all browns gives a peculiar feeling of satisfaction. the usda has an on line series on soil biology which gives a lot of insight into the organic cycle and i have a thread on here titled compost heaping about making this years heap.

jbclem just reread your post. do not add pine-or any evergreens-to your heap. it will bring the whole process to a screeching halt.

That is not true, I add pines needles all the time, if you are following the correct principles and adding enough coffee and browns nothing like that can slow it down. Pine needles are great.

If you can really get 50 pounds of coffee grounds, keep the ones you don't use it plastic tote bins, until you can use them, but they will still rot or decay. I could never get 50 pounds of coffee. Just tell them you only want small amounts each time. It would be ideal to add new coffee grounds weekly, but add browns at the same time, each time to counter balance the greens of the coffee. Maybe you can give the ones that are too much away in the free section of Craig's list to other gardeners. That would be a good way to meet new garden buddies.

I'd fling (distribute by hand) 50 pounds of UCG in all my gardens and over the lawn before bothering with giving them away. The biggest green part of my compost additions in winter is my own UCG. Wonderful stuff!

When I go into Starbucks, I ask them to give me all the UCGs that they have. Sometimes they don't have any or just a few, but often they'll give me a bag that weighs 50 pounds. That's heavy enough for me to struggle a bit to carry it to my car and heave it in the back (and I'm pretty strong from all that compost turning ;)

The grounds that I get are about 99.5% from making espresso drinks, so they are very dry and in the 'hockey puck' shapes. I've let them sit next to my bins, in the plastic bags they come in, for many months with no bad effects. They get a little moldy, but that doesn't matter once they go into the bin or flung somewhere. I always find a use for them.

Tropical, in the past you have said that you get really wet grounds from SB, that were used to make drip coffee. IME, and from what I've read here over the years, that is rare, and most of the time the grounds from SB are the dry, hockey puck ones. If you have wet ones or a mixture of both wet and dry, they may not store as well. But what is true for you isn't necessarily true for everyone.

My SB's runs usually produce more loose grounds than hockey pucks, but it's always a mix of both. And they have never been 'too wet'. Typically when I 'turn' my pile, I dump the decaying compost out of the large, holey bin it's sitting in, then reshovel it back to the bin layering coffee grounds, leaves, then the compost-in-process, watering each layer a bit. This *always* heats to at least 140, one time I got 170. imo it's the combo of leaves and UCGs.

Yes, that sounds like what I get, too, even though I may not have been clear in my last post. The grounds from espresso brewing have both hockey pucks and a lot of loose grounds and they are dry. I usually drop the bag on the ground a few times before I open it to break up the hockey pucks a bit.

The grounds from drip coffee brewing are very wet and all of them are loose. Sometimes there are paper filters mixed in. Sometimes I get a bag that has both, and if you look carefully, you can see the difference, not that it matters.

IME, any green will heat up a pile of leaves. Grass clippings and spent grain (from beer brewing) both work faster than UCGs, but are harder to come by. What matters is the nitrogen content.

I do get the hockey pucks, I have complained about that in the past, but now when I sort my pile, I squeeze each puck, but I wear disposable gloves to do that. When you squeeze them they fall apart. The normally have these small foil bags, that used to use that beans come in, but now my Starbucks won't do that, so I end up taking the separate compost trash from their collection. But, they would never say, oh here, take this 50 pound bag we have saved for you. They can be heavy, I don't think a full 50 pounds, but I just bring a big plastic tote and if its too heavy, I just take it in small sections. I put some in a small container once I get home to transfer it to the bins. I always use it all right away. I only storage it once thinking I could save it, but it did turn white with unpleasant mold. I think refrigeration, may be a key thing to saving them or even freezing them. Once they got this white mold, they were not as good, as I wanted them to be. They just don't seem to keep. Maybe a very big freezer like for a whole deer type thing would work? But, they are so good, I use all I get, I just have mix it in all the way into the whole pile if I get a lot of them. If I get a little bit, I just put in on the top of the pile and mix it in a just the top part to save time. Even if the compost is mostly finished, coffee grounds will still benefit that compost, and if it is not finished coffee grounds will speed it up and get it going again. Even if you don't add any browns and don't get any heat, it seems to break down food because its so acid, it kind of dissolves stuff. If you leave in a plastic bag, it will eat a hole in the bag at once.

If I had extras I would give them away on craigs. It would be great to find some gardening friends and composting friends are even harder to find. Very few people are really into compost. Composting to me is more fun then gardening. I just have the garden so I have so where to put my fabulous compost. For one thing I always have success with compost. In gardening some plants end up dying and doing poorly, and that is failure. But, compost always gives me positive strokes. There is nothing alive to die, and even my worms are very successful and happy. One thing is when I use the bin with no bottom and the worms can't exit, they will die, so I have remove the compost to a bin with a bottom so the worms can exit. If the worms are unhappy they try to escape from the top and the sides of the bin. But, I can always make the worms happy also, so its all good.

This post was edited by tropical_thought on Tue, Jan 20, 15 at 9:57

Regarding the OP's original problem of the pile not heating much: The three fundamentals are C:N ratio, aeration, moisture.

C:N ratio - I'm going to guess not enough greens if it's not heating. Someone above said not enough browns can cause this, but I've found when N is way too high - like a pile of grass clippings or even a grass/sawdust/leaf mix too heavy on the grass - it will get very hot and smelly. You don't have that problem, you have extended lack of breakdown of leaves, so add more greens.

Moisture must be adequate (moist, damp, not saturated or dry). Doubtful there's a problem here.

Air - you're turning it some, which helps, but from the pic, the pile is encased in clear plastic sheeting. Not a good strategy! It has only the top surface to breathe. Get that plastic out of there, use chicken wire, screen, burlap, etc. and let your compost breathe!

This post was edited by toxcrusadr on Wed, Jan 21, 15 at 12:04

greenman62, I forgot to answer your question...I add the grass clippings when they are fresh and green. Intuitively it would seem that they have more nitrogen when they are green (still alive) .

davids10, I've added shredded pine needles to my smaller pile (in plastic bin) with no sign that they prevented it from heating up. They were mixed with shredded oak leaves and kitchen scraps, so if there was a negative effect it wasn't noticeable. I may try a pile of shredded oak leaves by themselves just to see if they'll heat up, and then throw in some pine needles for effect.

I looked up pine needles in compost and its possible if you had a mostly pine needles pile it would make things go slowly, but I only have a little pine tree, so I was not using that many pine needles. If I had big huge pine trees, I could put them in the city compost for collection instead of composting them. They suggest shredding them first, but I don't have a shredder either. If any item makes up too much of your pile/bin, it is not such a good thing, it can overwhelm the pile. If I had a bin and I got like 300 rotten apples from my friend's tree and stuck them all in at once, or I got a lot pumpkins after Halloween, it would be too much for the pile to use them all at once. I would still try to use the pine needles, because I like to lower the ph, I have high ph soil and I am always trying to lower my ph. But, if you had high ph, then I would not use them. I would use egg shells, as they raise the ph.

OK, from all the responses (thank you)
, and looking at the pile again, i think what happened is the grass and UCG broke down fast when it heated.

i think i was weary of putting too much N
because of my mistake prior, by using over %50 coffee grounds.
So, i erred on the side of carbon, and the N broke down quickly....
Also, i think it was a bit dry. i have a lid on my bin
because, before i had a bin, it was always too wet.
it rains a lot here.

i do have oak leaves which were not shredded, but they were small leaves, and i dont have a shredder.
looks like they are the main thing that is not broken down.

i just got 3 yards of dirt
and need the compost, unfinished or not, as mulch now...
so, i will be using it as is, and starting another pile
LOL :)

BTW...
i just saw a video that said pine needles do not change the PH of the soil.
i used to use them as mulch until my neighbor cut the tree down.
too bad, they worked great (along with the cones) , and after a few years gave me some nice soil in the bed i was adding them too.

Here is a link that might be useful: pine needles PH

If you are in a really big hurry, I would buy bagged compost, you can also add your own compost to bagged compost which stretches out the compost to give you more volume in a pinch. Plus you get all the good things in the homemade compost along with increased volume. That was a great video about pine needles.

Any pH effect from an organic (plant) matter source is likely to be temporary because the acidic compounds are organic compounds that will decompose in the compost or in the ground. Inorganic minerals (lime, sulfur, etc.) have a more lasting effect on soil pH.

+1 on the bagged compost...in a pinch, any compost is better than no compost at all.

" +1 on the bagged compost...in a pinch, any compost is better than no compost at all."

Maybe, but bagged compost can sometimes be worse than none at all. I had a few bags left over from a job and just tossed them in a hidden corner outdoors. Months of sun and mother nature destroyed the bags and I noticed something green growing from them. Turned out to be nutgrass. Out of curiosity I asked the man who was maintaining the property if there had been any nutgrass at the property. He said they did have to controll some nutgrass. The source was/is one of the largest homeowner landscape suppliers in the nation so it can't be blamed on an uninformed small time mom and pop operation.

I don't see where anyone who added here mentioned using Alfalfa as an additive to the compost pile. Not only is is a good source of Nitrogen, and a little goes a long way, but it also contains a hormone called Triaconanal [verified by scientists] that's left in the compost after the Alfalfa has decayed and can cause 50% increase of growth in any plant that has the compost put on it. I have a huge compost pile heatting like a mini Mnt. Snt. Helens right now, in S. Mo. and we just got thru having the coldest weather in many winters here. I have leaves, kitchen scraps, rotted hay, a little garden soil and about 10 lbs of Alfalfa pellets, found at most feedstores here at 15 bucks a 50 lb bag. I've turned the pile twice in the past month, wetting it down good each time, and coverring it with a triple tarp to keep heat in and excess rain or snow out. the be ready to use in a month when I start planting the spring seeds. Strongeagle

Strongeagle,I think the expense is main reason why more don't use Alfaifa. Most dedicated composters tend to be frugal as well as desiring to recycle for the benifit of our enviroment. I buy Alfaifa occasionaly for my rabbit raising friend's animals. I hearvest clover from late winter to mid summer for her rabbits as well as adding to compost.

I made a hot compost pile (about 3'x3'x4') in late Oct./Nov. of 2014. It was composed of fallen leaves (I hate having to climb for them - way to slow), chicken manure/sawdust and UCG. It heated up very quickly (2 days) to about 140F. Once it started to cool down I turned it to bring back the heat. Turned it a total of 3-4 times and it remained above 130F for over a month so I was thrilled.
So here's my question now......should I just leave it as is and use it (not completely broken down) or should I turn it again and/or add more N to try to heat it up and finish the breakdown? I should mention that I added about 1/2lb of worms about three weeks ago to see if they would help with the decomp. and populate the pile.
Harry

You can use it now if you mix it with your native soil, because that will cool down any heat that may be still going on. Mix it all up and dig it into the ground.

In recent weeks my organic coffee grounds source has come back on line. The first time I got a bag of about 30 lbs, and made a small pile next to my old compost pile. It was small and only about 4-6" high, but within a day or two it was 15 degrees F hotter than the old cold pile (75F compared to 60F). A week later I added more and it was 6-8" high, still holding the 75F. Last week I added another 20-30 lbs and it's about 8-10" high. I noticed today that the temp is up between 90-100F. So pure coffee grounds, without the paper filters which I removed, is making a miniature compost pile cook.

I just picked up 50lbs tonight, I'll add that and see what happens. The coffee grounds pile is about 24"x24"x 10" before adding the latest.

i just watched a video where the guy had a large pile of only coffee grounds , and they heated up very nicely.
the pile was about 5 ft tall though.

jbclem
i think in the video, the guy must have been adding them on a regular basis, and the sun would dry out the top layer
so even when i keep the top open on the bin, its pretty much in the shade, only getting an hour or 2 of sun every day.

i had done this last year and mine didnt heat up, even added grass clippings to the mix.
i think my pile was too small though, and maybe too wet
this guys pile looked pretty dry.
it scared me away from using too many grounds when i had a pile that just sat there for months.
i finally bagged it all up, and now just use it as mulch when i need it.

i have also seen bags of only grass clippings heat up pretty hot.... hot enough to almost burn my hand

i would LOVE to have Alfalfa
i have about 100 seeds, but i live in the suburbs, even though i am turning my backyard into a small food-forest, i really dont have a lot of room to grow on a large scale.
after this compost is done,
i may try to be very selective about what goes in the next pile, and make it only Alfalfa, UCG, kit scraps, and other things i know have a high nutrient content.

i can just chop-and-drop the rest of the stuff, weeds etc...

although, certain weeds like dandelion are very high in minerals, i dont get enough of them to make a difference.

Wow, David10; I am impressed. Its always dangerous for me when I get too dogmatic. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. I tried chopping leaves with the mower once...its not for me and I had already figured out that getting the leaves to take moisture was going to be tricky. So I am sticking to the three year wait. I am getting some nicely bedded goat manure soon and that will heat easy and pronto.

Is that fenced area your compost bin? It huge, how will find enough to fill it?