Crops & Breeds

♻️ Composting

6 methods · honest clocks, from the app's compost catalog

Methods

• 🔥 Hot pile · finished in ~10 weeks — The fast one, and the only method that KILLS what goes in: 131–160°F cooks weed seeds and pathogens. It needs mass to heat — 3×3×3 ft minimum — a browns-to-greens mix of roughly 2:1, and a turn every week or so. Ten weeks, give or take, and a pile can run two or three batches a season.
• 🍂 Cold pile · finished in ~40 weeks — Toss it on and wait — most of a year, sometimes more. No turning, no recipe, no fuss. The honest tradeoff: cold never kills anything, so no weed seeds and no diseased plants, or the garden inherits them with the compost.
• 🛢️ Tumbler · finished in ~6 weeks — Fast and tidy — a crank instead of a pitchfork, rodent-proof, and fine on a patio. The catch is size: a drum holds a few cubic feet, so it feeds beds and containers, not a market garden. Fill it, stop adding, tumble every few days, and it finishes in about six weeks.
• 🕳️ Trench · finished in ~26 weeks · feeds the ground in place — nothing to harvest — Dig, bury, cover, and walk away — the scraps compost IN the ground and feed whatever's planted over them next season (squash on last year's trench is an old tradition). It never yields a wheelbarrow of compost, which is why the ledger doesn't count it as supply: the bed already got paid.
• 🍁 Leaf mold · finished in ~78 weeks — Just leaves, wire, and patience — a FUNGAL rot, not a bacterial one, so it's cold and slow: twelve to twenty-four months. The pile shrinks to a quarter of what you raked, and what's left is the best seed-starting and moisture-holding amendment a homestead can make for free.
• 🪣 Bokashi · finished in ~2 weeks · feeds the ground in place — nothing to harvest — Fermentation, not composting: a sealed bucket, bran inoculant, and TWO WEEKS — and it takes what no pile should (meat, dairy, cooked food). The output is a pickle, not compost: it still has to be buried in soil or fed to a pile for a few weeks to finish, which is why the ledger counts the bucket as feeding the ground, not filling the barrow.