Darn that fugitive nitrogen!
"After 9 hours, I just ran out of materials and energy," I said, shaking my head in dismay. "My pile is a good 6" too short, so we'll see...." "Why are you doing this?" asked my Master Gardener friend Carol, after patiently listening to me go on and on about bags of chicken manure and old leaves, pitchforks and pine cones, "greens" and "browns". Hot compost piles do mean HOURS of hard labor. I laughed. And I do have an answer... Because [embarrassed] we have a towering pyramid of chicken manure, and not the well-mannered kind. Open a bag and peer in, and a torrent of flies explode out in your face. [Ewww! Gross!] Because we have mounds of sunflowers that were attacked by mold, and piles of brush bristling with weed seeds of various hardy sorts. If you can hit the target 150-degrees for half a day, you can kill them all! Because YouTube videos make it look so easy. When done right, it's--like--the BEST science ex...
