A troubleshooting almanac
Your pile smells, or drips, or has simply stopped — and you want a straight answer, not a course in compost chemistry. Pick the symptom below and get a fix you can try today. Each page is one cause and one or two changes.
Match what the pile is doing; each page is one cause and one or two changes.
A working pile smells like damp earth. Anything sharper is the pile telling you what's wrong.
A pile should feel like a wrung-out sponge. If a squeezed handful drips, it's too wet to work properly.
If the pile looks exactly as it did a month ago, it has probably dried out and stalled.
A home compost pile runs cooler than a commercial one, so it can't handle everything a city or county yard-waste program can.
A cold, quiet pile in January is resting, not broken.
Browns give a pile its structure and carbon, greens its moisture and nitrogen — and the balance between them decides how the whole pile behaves.
Rats, flies, and ants are each pointing at a different underlying problem — read them as clues, not just nuisances.
Maggots don't mean your compost has failed. They mean something fresh and wet is within a fly's reach, and that's easy to change.
Nearly everything crawling in your compost bin is helping to make compost. A crowd of them is usually a clue about the top layer, and that's easy to change.
Most tumbler trouble is water. Wet scraps plus spinning roll into balls and stall, and the fix is dry browns, your hands and a bit more patience than the box promised.
What you find in the middle of the bin tells you what to change.
A cold bin isn't a failed bin. Heat makes compost faster, but it isn't what makes compost.
A closed plastic cone bin is slow and cool by design. What you find in the middle and at the bottom tells you whether it's stuck or just taking its time.
In a bin, compost is ready from the bottom up. Start there, take what's done, and let the rest carry on.