So we got a lot of dead leaves/ pine needles collected with all sorts of good lookin molds and such growing on em. We were gonna mix these into the soil for our plants for the worms and soil to love cuz at the time it just seemed smart. Luckily I read mixing too much of this will use up all the nitrogen I have some other little bits of things mixed in for some nutrients of the soil. But for these leaves should I focus on composting them separately and then using them in the soil or should i mix a bunch in and use something like blood meal or feather meal to make up for the nitrogen? If so any type of ratio idea? I plan on using some top dressing nutrients later on but I was hoping for some happy soil to let the plants jump in and enjoy some water for a little. I may sound like a complete idiot with this stuff and you can tell me that lol I’m used to salty nutes with specific doses everyday. Or farming food outside in the ground which the ground is a whole nother ball game. We were planning on doing 55 gallon pots.
So I would dump them all out on that tarp and add a 25# bag each of composted poultry manure, composted cow manure or and worm castings if you can’t find castings just use the best compost you can find and gather some worms on a wet morning to toss into the pile after it cooks . Throw in tons of green grass clippings from a lawn that doesn’t get sprayed or that Scotts shit spread on it, or just more greens from the woods especially comfrey or horsetail if those grow in the swamps around you. Put in some gypsum, like 10#, and some bentonite clay if you can find it. Crab shell meal is great if you can find it, or lobster meal anything shellfish even shrimp or crayfish. I like fish bone meal more than cow but it’s all good, put that in too. Maybe five pounds of garden or livestock kelp meal. All this stuff is super cheap at a farm supply or feed store. Mix that pile with half again as much of your local soil you’re improving, so a 2:1 ratio of leaf/stuff mix to dirt. If your dirt doesn’t have any sand in it, add some clean river or creek sand. If there a place near you that cuts gravestones or monuments or a quarry, you can get free rock dust from them and mix in a 5g bucket of that, it’ll be mostly granite, basalt or marble with some slate or other stuff in there. That’s good stuff. Some landscaping pumice would be good too, you can probably find that for cheap or free, it’s just like perlite but it doesn’t float and blow away.
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Sta-Green-Sta-Green-Fast-Acting-Gypsum-25-lb/5013109061
https://www.redbudsoilcompany.com/a/sc/amp/products/bentonite-clay-5lb
https://www.hardwarestore.com/189637-coast-of-maine-kelp-meal-kelp-meal-4-lb
If you wanted an easier answer than all those meals and stuff just buy two 8# of Espoma Tomato-Tone, and/or Bio-Tone Starter/Plant-Tone one or more of those three with that kelp/clay/gypsum it would do just fine.
Mix it all up, pour on a bucket of molasses water and water it down nice and well soaked then wrap it up covered and let it cook it’ll heat up. When it stops being warm turn it, keep it real moist, when it stops getting warm after you turn it, it’s ready to use. At that point you could cut it more with your native soil and it would activate it well, or just use it straight, or use more aeration like perlite or pumice or rice hulls etc to use it as a potting mix.
I would do a hot composting over the course of a couple of weeks. You need some more N in there for that to work though so chicken manure or other sources of N would be good to layer it with into a big pile. If you go this route, having a long compost thermometer is best, that way you can ensure the pile gets hot enough before raking it back out again. Cold composting leaves 80% in the air and 20% in the soil (well, compost actually, but soil it will become), hot composting leaves 80% of usable matter in the soil and 20% in the air, it kills pathogens, and the nutrients become available to the soil a hell of a lot faster. Plus the nitrogen is taken care of at the beginning making it more conducive to the “hard work now, better days tomorrow” mindset.
There has been research on how to hot compost the fastest and most effectively, some university made a paper on it. I should be able to look it up if you can’t seem to find it.
I just want to say off the bat that you got the Eco dream right there 
Make a wooden box for the compost.
Place it somewhere shadowy and with good drainage capability, because you do not want water buildup.
Add lots of old sticks to the bottom of the compost to help drainage and air circulation within the compost.
To build a good compost you add things into layers.
You start of with a layer of your olds etc, then add a layer of papper, woodchips and wilted leafs(brown material) and then a layer of fresh grass clipping/greens or food leftovers(green material) . Then a mix of dirt and worm casting to increase the microbiology.then do this over and over.
You want about 25-30 parts brown material to 1parts of green material. To keep a good balance and a healthy compost. Your collected material, counts as brown material. So you just need to add green material in that ratio. I like to add some woodchips and old papper, even though I got a lot of brown material like you just because it introduce more micro diversity and woodchips help to keep it fluffy.
Keep a tarp on top of the box to keep it moist and take a shovel and poke around it once and a while so that you introduce air into the mix. If you notice that it starts to get abit dry, you can water it. In 3-6 months, you’ll have dark brown, super soil.
Hope if help my friend 
Pz 
@Wizzlez @LonelyOC @Dirt_Wizard thank you guys! I’m glad I looked up and asked on here before we just mixed it all in the soil and went ahead. My neighbor that I do this with thought it would be a great idea because his buddy that grows in the ground, tills this stuff in with maybe adding some chicken manure and they look like solid grows to him. But the ground is a whole nother ball game with everything in it, especially with the true nature out here, and definitely warmer being able to cook more through out chilly times. It gets extremely cold here for a lot of the year. My neighbor is 77 (im 25) and he’s been doing low key grows out here silently for a long time. He would never google things about nutrients lol he thinks it’s 40 years ago legally still and treats it like a guerrilla grow but we live in a state where we can have a handful legally. So we just do big plants 55-100 gallons, very very far from the road and hidden. But for this reason he doesn’t understand how much Info like this is so easily attainable and how many mistakes and experiments we can skip with the beautiful advice like this. I’m so used to hydro but it’s so interesting bringing in all these different natural ingredients. My goal is to learn and switch over everything indoor and out to organic over time.
Months is indeed possible, but if you follow the guidelines of the paper I pointed to it’s rather a few weeks.
“Recently, a new method has been developed
which corrects some of the problems associated
with the old type of composting. With this process,
compost can be made in 2 to 3 weeks.”
From the university of Berkeley, California, you can find it at
The green to brown parts is where a lot of misunderstanding happens. When you mix green with brown, the brown is dry and loses less moisture. The ratios mentioned before, IIRC refer to the net amount of carbon to nitrogen.
But when mixing green materials and brown ones, you mix in equal amounts by volume to get to a close to ideal ratio. If your chicken manure is pure shit and not in the form of manure+litter, then you would need to account for that in your calculations. But for most organic farmers chicken manure comes with hay, straw or woodchips, and those are brown matter instead of green, where the chicken shit is considered the green (nitrogen providing equals green, carbon providing equals brown).
What’s also interesting is the moisture content of the pile. Where in my climate (quite a bit cooler than California, where the paper was written) my pile needs to be partly shaded but still receive lots of sun, and my soil is naturally sandy, dry and void of clay particles, while we receive plenty of rain most years, the advice on my grounds would be to not add the layer at the bottom that lets water through, and to provide the aeration by turning inside out the pile several times. My soil is naturally acidic so I can add some of my fireplace ashes to the pile to decrease the acidity a bit, but for Californian soils it is against recommendations because the soil is basic already.
Turning the pile inside out every other day, together with high temperatures and small size of starting material components, is what makes this fast turnaround possible, together with using bins preferably; Bins are not needed in Californian climate as far as I’m aware, and neither in mine when done in full summer, but in spring, a bin of sorts is probably absolutely necessary in my region.
In my compost pile I also try to add some clay powder (not a lot) when I have it on hand, not because it’s necessary but because it is something my soil is missing and this way I can work some in over time.
If you don’t know how your soil is, feel it to judge it, and talk to the plants, like you would to a marihuana plant, look at them the same and see where they are struggling, and look up what requirements the plants that you know by name have so you can judge the soil according to their state. One plant probably won’t tell you enough because each plant has influence on the soil around it and so the soil will be slightly different each place in part because of the soil composition and in part because of the food web composition and what partners are in the soil in fungi and critter form.
If I have bags of organic, already composted chicken manure, does that defeat the purpose or will this stuff work? If this isn’t right I will get what is. I believe there was hay/straw type material mixed in there. The bag is in the garage I’m feeding the indoor ladies now. I have one pic of the bag from yesterday
Would a bag like this be considered brown since it’s already composted and mixed or is it still green?
Are you talking about a paper bag or about the contents of the bag?
The bag is usable as brown material, the garden and lawn food, I would think is not usable in your compost pile.
Fresh chicken poop. Got anyone with chickens nearby? Chickens live everywhere and they shit everywhere, and most people with chickens have more chickenshit on their hands than they care for, and most are aware chicken coops need a cleaning every week. That means 3 chicken owners means 2 will give you their poop and thank you for it.
The contents of the bag
Them you could just use for raking in right now.
It’ll give your soil a first kick of nutes while the compost heap does it’s work, and while you keep your back straight to turn that pile inside out, or while you sit back and wait a few months, your choice.
I always add kieserite to my compost pile, which adds magnesium and sulfur in a very slow manner, and when it’s almost done I also add a good amount of epsom salt (magnesium sulfate that dissolves and absorbs rather well, contrary to kieserite that’s barely soluble in water)
I’m sorry if I’m sounding dumb I’m struggling to fully understand since it’s all new. When you say mixing equal amounts by volume do you mean I’d want to mix in the Same size pile of grass clippings in with this pile of leaves.
Yea many have chickens near by but honestly most charge for the chicken compost because locals are generally farmers here. I’ve picked up a good bit of horse compost for free tho and used for different things outside but never the weed plants. Thank you for the help here and that pdf it has good info
Best is to use a variety of things, with the fast composting method you can even throw in that itchy ugly wool christmas sweater, as long as it’s made of non-synthethic materials, you can throw it in there. A fresh roadkill is the perfect compost starter. There’s enough to be found to not have to use the gas pedal for it.
But yes, equal parts in volume. Same size pile, or equal amount of wheelbarrows, is how I like to count.
There’s things to consider of course. My green pile this year has lots and lots of rootmats with soil in there too. That detracts from the amount of true green so I can use a bit less of the brown in comparison. But my chicken pile has lots of shit in comparison to litter.
Some of my green leaves are going brown by now, another thing to think about.
By the way I think for your leaves it’s best not to leave them in closed off bags.
All my cannabis trimmings that don’t have enough glands for processing go in the green pile too, just as cooked food does.
No dog shit or cat shit allowed, unless the dog is a vegetarian. Carnivorous dung is no bueno. Cat shit delivers a sickly kick of toxoplasmosis to your soil, which is of course bad if you plan on processing anything that grows in the soil or gets soilsplash on it.
If you make your own beer the yeast dredges are great for it too, just as for general pouring out around the garden; Coffee sludge adds heaps of nitrogen and can be a great addition if you think your pile might be short on it. Can be added afterwards when watering the pile, just add to a watering can and keep it mixed while pouring it out.
Coffee dredges can be aquired freely from willing local cafe’s or restaurants, ask first of course, then return and hand them a clean bucket to keep them in and give them a good tip and you’ll have a return source every time.
Coffee dredges poured around the plant’s trunk also make sure cats don’t shit around the plants, when digging around in soil with coffee gunk it gets in between their toes, it annoys them enough to keep them out of there, usually. Don’t try it late in flower unless you want to smoke literall grass (builds up chlorophyll which is bad late in flower)
Thank you once again, and these were in bags like this because we got so many delivered im these bags this is about half, we shredded the other half through a leaf shredder a couple times and have A LOT of these leaves and pine needles shredded.
But I’ll be sure to empty them all out and mix them as soon as we get together the ingredients we need
I want to add that I understand the idea of adding any kind of manure to the compost, but it’s not needed if you have food leftovers and fresh grassclipping for example. The most important “additive” in my experience is already high quality finished compost from the same microclimate. This is because you need a boost in the right ratio of microbial life. So if you have an neighbour with a compost, use some of their compost to top every layer stack off when your put everything together. Keeping to the ratio of green and brown material that I pointed out with an good additive like this is key to a successful compost(25-30 brown parts to 1 part green).
Here you have an list of examples of brown vs green compost material:
Brown materials (carbon-rich):
Dry leaves
Straw or hay
Small branches and twigs
Sawdust
Shredded paper or cardboard
Pine needles
Wood chips or bark
Corn stalks
Dried grass clippings
Green materials (nitrogen-rich):
Fresh grass clippings
Kitchen waste (fruit and vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, tea bags)
Green leaves
Fresh weeds (preferably not seeding)
Fresh plant trimmings and prunings
Manure (e.g., from horses, cows, or chickens)
Seaweed or algae (rinsed to remove excess salt)
Garden waste (e.g., spent annuals, green leafy vegetables)
Hope it helps.
Pz
Awesome yes big help you guys are the best. So glad I put this on here before we moved forward. It’s a very different concept than his buddy that tills them in the ground every year because there is so much nature out here to. Deers constantly leave presents around the yard even lol.
You can do it in a lot of different ways and there is no optimum way of doing it because every microclimate is different. There is still a lot of discoveries in this area that needs to be explored and discovered, but understanding the basics of how microbial life works. Will make it possible for you to adapt over time to get the best soil possible for your plants. Most exciting this is that nobody can do this, but you with your “farm”.
Pz
PS: the reason for the roadkill is every bird and mammal contains all the microorganisms that are needed to start up the life needed for successful breakdown of the pile. It’s not needed, but it’s highly beneficial to a fast startup.