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 weeds 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 experiment ever! Wham--a radical transformation in just two weeks!
• And because my inner kid really loves playing in the mud. :)

 

Running out every morning, I was disappointed to find the temperature at the center of the pile at 120-degrees.  A slow burn.  But not the 150 or 160 spike I was hoping for.

After 4 days, I concluded that my manure hadn't been hot enough.  I think that over the long summer months our chicken poo had either already mostly composted itself in the bag, or had dried out--the precious nitrogen vaporizing in the form of ammonia.

Mold spores 1: Pile 0.

 

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Appendix 

Here is the recipe.  For a hot compost pile ( also called a "managed pile") you need Carbon and Nitrogen (roughly 3:1), Air and Water.  And mass: minimum 3'x3'x3' / maximum 5'x5'x5'.

Carbon - "browns" - dead leaves and shredded paper
Nitrogen - "greens" - grass clippings, manure, kitchen scraps
Air - bulking materials [optional - vent pipe]
Water - everything the consistency of a wrung-out sponge