For educational purposes, I created a compost pile with the kids that attend one of the summer camps I work at. I used an Elliot Coleman compost recipe from his "Four-Season Harvest" book:

In layers:

1. One inch of soil (in our case, some well composted material made from leaves, etc. that the residential community the camp is located in generates)

2. 1-6 inches "greens" (I used grass and hedge clippings).

3. Three inches of straw for "browns".

We repeated these layers until we had a pile about 3 feet high. The compost is in a 3 X 3 ft enclosure made of rubber coated, chain link fencing the community had on hand.

When we made the pile, I did not have access to water, so did not add any extra moisture. It's been a very dry summer here, until recently when we had some thunderstorms.

We made the pile on June 30th. We dug into the pile a couple of weeks later and it was generating some heat. I checked the pile again recently and it was cool and much of the original green material appeared to be at least partially broken down.

I've not added any water yet because I understand over-watering a compost pile is a common mistake and some moisture from the recent storms we had must have added some moisture (I have no covering over the pile). IÂve also yet to try turning the pile.

Any suggestions for getting the pile going again, so that it is producing some heat, would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

John