i taught myself to compost. well actually the internet did. and i've been doing it for 1 summer so far. i seem to be the only one who actually wants to do it or is interested in it enough to enjoy it, no one else cares!

I'm from a farm family, and if anyone ever composted, I never heard about it. We had some pigs, cattle, some horses (pets) and dairy cows. And lots of chickens. One uncle raised quarter horses. Manure was certainly used on the fields, but as far as I know, that's it.

I first heard of composting about twenty years ago when a friend was talking about starting a pile. That's really the only time I'd heard of it. Then over the years, I'd heard it off and on but never knew anyone who did it.

This past season I was attacked by many bugs and normally would have used Sevin but had gotten interested (by accident and by the fact that I no longer let my cats outdoors because I now live in town) in butterfly/bird gardening. I'd worked hard to attract them and didn't want to douse everything in Sevin and kill my friends.

So I found my way here (had been visiting the bird/butterfly forums), and now I'm a convert. It's organic gardening all the way and this summer I started my first compost bin. I really don't think I'll ever use Sevin again, and I'm hoping next summer to wean myself off of Miracle Grow in favor of compost tea. I should also give props to Paul James, because his constant talk about composting and not using chemicals finally soaked into my head.

My whole family thinks I'm a bit daffy, but they also humor me and think it's "cute." My mother now saves her coffee grounds for me, and every month or so comes for a visit with a few large cans of grounds. (She drinks lots of coffee)

The rest of the family would prefer that I stay out of manure piles, but they tolerate it and don't try to talk me out of it. I'm not quite sure why...we grew up around manure and even though it had its stinky side, it was always good for the crops.

Another uncle, who still farms and is an avid gardener, thinks I've gone round the bend. His advice: douse everything in Sevin and stop messing with all that other silliness. He says we always had "piles" by barns, but I sure don't think anyone took advantage of the black gold.

Many times when I'm playing with my pile, I think of my grandfather, a lifelong farmer, and imagine he's looking down on me with that twinkle in his eye, chuckling and saying "Atta girl." He taught me about tractors and bird dogs and hunting and milking cows and things, but he also taught me to love the land and never hunt anything you won't eat. Conserve and utilize.

Organic gardening/farming and compost piles would be something foreign to him, but I think he'd get a kick out of it and be really proud of me. :)

Started about 12 years ago. I wanted to attract fishing worms. It was a moderate success at first.

I actually started on a large scale from day one. I sold plants for large growers all over the country, Walters Gardens in Mi the largest perennial grower in the world and Zelenka Nursery also in Mi who was the largest evergreen grower in the world until they tried to get ever bigger and went belly up. I also sold for Old Fort industries the original start of Hyponex and later sold for Hyponex.
I found a need in my market for hardwood mulch so I opened a mulch company, which is where the fire story comes from. Out of the hardwood bark fines I started composting and bagging Humus and Potting soil. Then I bought a yard waste compost facility and continued the hardwood bark and humus business and included Pine Bark and Cypress Bark mulches.
We also during this period bagged for Hyponex and others plus our own bags marketing to independent garden centers and the big boxes, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, etc. If you bought a bag of mulch or humus within 150 miles of Louisville, KY it may have been mine regardless of what name was on the bag.
It was during this period that I studied composting with the various professional associations in our business.
Now, I'm retired and play in my garden applying some of what little I learned.

I started composting as a "back to the lander" in the early 70's - always part of my gardening to avoid commercial fertilizers - got serious about it when I met an ag prof who specialized in soil science, and later got him to do a master composter course, with me a first graduate - I then supplied the site for the hot compost seminars :)

the prof, myself, and a few other composters got the local govt to start a public compost demo garden as part of promoting recycling, and that's evolved well, including the regional sewage treatment plant building a major biosolids composting facility - the city here now has curbside yard waste pickup that's composted in conjunction with that biosolids operation

next we have to get all the big organic waste producers like grocers and restaurants into the loop - NO organic waste should go to the landfill

Bill

I re-started composting back in the late 1990's when the law changed and lawn and yard waste was no longer allowed in local land fills.

I learned composting and gardening from my Grandmother back in the 1950"s.

She raised chickens in a raised "brooder house". It was about 3 feet off the ground and had a covered area for the nests and a screened area in the daylight. The screened area had wooden slates that allow the chicken poop to fall to the ground.

As a child I was her "garden helper" (slave). My job was to each spring shovel the pile of semi-composted chicken manure out from under the chicken coop and spread it on her garden. She only kept the chickens during the summer and early fall so the manure had all winter to "compost".

In the fall when Grandmother butchered her chickens... "my job" was to hold the legs of the chicken while Grandma lopped of their heads with a clever. The feathers and heads then went back to the chicken coop to "winter" with the chicken poop pile. She insisted I hold onto the bird until it stopped moving because she did not want any "broken chicken wings".

Ahh...those wonderful childhood memories!

She also had a regular compost pile at one end of her large garden for garden waste.

Pete

BTW ... Grandma was very generous with those chickens...I remember my Mom filling our larger chest freezer to the lid with chickens each fall.

I was going to say I grew up on a farm but I've never really grown up. I was raised on a farm. Manure, gardens, dead animals etc etc. Some guys golf, some play poker, some fish, sail or whatever. Me, I like to compost. If I can design and build "stuff" to help me do that...BONUS. I find great enjoyment in discovering others who build or adapt things to make compost. (then I steal their ideas without shame). Been playing (and I mean playing) at composting for 12 or so years now. Only started experimenting with different methods in the past three years.

Lloyd

This is my first year of actively composting. In the past, my composting consisted of throwing leaves on all of my beds in the fall :). Thanks to all of you kind folks on this forum, I consider my first year a success. It's been a great learning experience and the benefits of active composting were very evident in my fall garden. I am really looking forward to digging into the beds come spring since I added a good amount of compost to them recently and then covered them with mulch. When I pulled the spent plants, there were already many worms in it.

Thanks to all of you for the wealth of information and Happy Holidays as well.

Kristi

I've been composting for about 6 years now, started with lasagne beds. The landlord stopped by while I was waiting on some greens and had a fit about the 'trash' piled up too close to the house! So to appease him, I started my first compost pile way out at the back of the yard. I only have 1 large pallet bin, but it gives me as much as I can use. I learned how to make compost right here on this forum.

Pam

I started composting back in the 1960's when my children were born because I thought there must be some way to pass this earth on to them in a better condition than it was passed on to me and my generation. I found J. I Rodale and Organic Gardening, read all the books by Sir Albert Howard I could get, read Friend Sykes, Lady Eve Balfour, the Nearings, Racheal Carson, Beatrice Trum Hunter, Leonard Wickenden, and others. Studied them, tried what they were teaching, and found what worked most bestest on this beach sand soil.

I started composting in 1983 when I bought my first home. I had a subscription to Organic Gardening Magazine and learned most about composting from then. Then around 2001 I found these boards on the internet and have been learing more from all of you.
Alberta

My mom had a garden for several years when I was a kid and I was fascinated by the mixing up of soil amendments to get the perfect recipe for growing things. However, that frequently meant getting handfuls of lawn fertilizer from the shed and putting them in holes before planting plants.

Seems like we had a compost pile once or twice, and that was the first I had known of the concept, although I don't think we did anything with kitchen scraps -- just yard waste.

After 15 years of city apartment living, my wife and I moved and bought a house last year. I don't know that we even talked much about it, but one of our first projects was a compost bin, followed shortly after by raised garden beds.

Having a garden was just one of those things we were going to do when we got a house. And despite my early experience with fertilizer, I think we were going to go organic by default.

About April 2006 I logged on to this forum and that was when I started learning about composting. You guys are awesome. Thanks for all the help. When I get home from work I look forward to shoveling compost. It is starting to get dark before I get home so I use the flashlight.

My family were subsistence farmers in the swamps. Their composting consisted of piles of stuff somewhere out off to the side somewhere out of the way. They probably never even heard the word compost.

I hitchhiked off to collage and started a chemistry major, ran out of money and the USAF CIP sent me to university to study medical microbiology. Microbiology was very useful later as I worked nights in a hospital and did graduate studies in horticulture and soil science at an agricultural collage.

I got started in composting after getting sucked into medical information systems, from which I retired, having never worked in horticulture or agriculture or even had a garden since I was 17 years old.

My first attempt at composting resulted in hay!

Over two decades I got better at composting as my back got older and I finally had to resign myself to kibitzing here.

Haphazardly composting on and off since '85 when I bought a home in the city. Then we moved in 2001, 1/2 hour away from the city where trees grow in boulders and where you can have soil ranging from clay to sand to rocks to woodland soil on all of our 2/3 acre.

Checked in on this forum one day, and now I read, read, and read some more.

Challenged myself to have a hot compost throughout a Canadian winter two years ago and succeeded. Truly enjoyed the personal satisfaction of producing beautiful rich amendment for the gardens when they were sleeping and discovered that winter can be a gardening season after all.

I've been composting on and off for almost 50 years. Grew up on a 300-year old family farm where animal manure was routinely spread on the fields, crops were rotated, and we always had compost piles...our garden soil was the proverbial black gold, we mulched with old hay, and the vegetables and fruit grew like crazy. Have been trying to recreate that "black gold" in every place I've lived since. After ten years back on land in the country I think I may be getting close...

My father was a "conservationist" long before people called themselves environmentalists. 40+ years ago I remember my family making an organic fruit spray that involved grinding up onions and things, smelled awful to me, I guess that was the point. We always composted, and our garden was down a short steep hill from the house, so instead of walking down, in the winter especially, we would just stand in the backyard and fling the kitchen scraps down the hill to the garden.

In my first apt. it was very hard for me to transition from putting kitchen scraps here, newspapers for recycling there, cans in a big container, paper trash for burning in another place, etc. to just throwing everything out into one trash bag. Almost painful. I started saving my aluminum then (1979) even though I had no idea where to recycle it. I just knew they were recyclable and I hated throwing them away. (Remembered the video I had seen in 1970 on the first Earth Day and how much energy it takes to process aluminum into cans.) After I had moved the large bags of aluminum cans with me TWICE I finally gave them to my sister. She worked for a brewery and knew where to recycle aluminum.

20 years ago when I got married and we bought our first house, we automatically started a compost pile. My hubby's family composts, too. Whenever people post that they don't have enough room for a compost pile, I tell them about that first pile. It was in a ring of chicken wire between the air conditioner and the house. It was a townhouse, we had houses connected on both sides to ours, and a very small yard. We know it never smelled, as the pile was directly below our bedroom window. We also started saving our metal cans and glass bottles years before a local recycling center opened, just knowing that someday one would come along. Guess I am what you call a rabid environmentalist.

When we moved to our second house, we moved the compost pile with us, along with some weeds to compost! We are on our third home, where we have 3 permanent compost piles and 2 smaller seasonal ones, and several lasagna beds, including a new one about 25 X 4.5 feet and 16 inches tall. Basically we kept moving to houses with larger yards, now we have 5 acres.

I brought home about 40 bags of other people's leaves last month, and I get old produce from a local weekend market to make extra compost with. I have never had too much compost.

Marcia

Hi everyone, I'm new to the site...
I started composting last February. My mom and grandmother were both super gardeners and now that I'm married and have a house in the country, I've discovered my own green thumb. Unfortunately, the soil seems to be poor on our property. Even my mom, who is an incredible gardener, had a difficult time getting things to grow out there when she and my dad lived on that property. I actually started composting simply because at the time I was eating lots and lots of fresh fruits and vegetables and I don't have a garbage disposal so I decided to find out about composting rather than dumping all these scraps in the garbage. Also, it occurred to me that I could improve the soil where I want to plant with compost (duh). So, I hunted around on the internet, got some tips, and got to work. I drilled some holes in the bottom of a large rectangular rubbermaid container, dumped in all my scraps, covered that with leaves, added some water, put the container in an area of high sunlight, and I've been hooked ever since. At first, I ran out to the pile every day after work to turn it and add more scraps and leaves. I neglected that particular container for awhile late this summer but I went out and turned everything a few weeks ago and most everything is broken down, it smells wonderful, and is rich and black. And, there's a ton of it! I dumped it into a large wheelbarrow to turn it and it filled it up completely. So, I went ahead and started another pile although I don't know how well it will heat up during the winter. I guess it'll break down eventually! Right now, the only problem I'm having, other than the unusually cold weather we're having here in NC, is that the new pile is in a rubber garbage can (holes in bottom) that I don't have a cover for. I've got deer, I think, pulling things out and eating, the rotting apples I threw on top the other day. I'm going to try putting a black garbage bag over the can, upside down, maybe with a slit in the top and see it that works.

I was a city girl who married a farmer and moved to the country. First I started gardening. Next I noticed how good my soil became when I added old piles of grass clippings, rotted tree stumps, etc. - just stuff I found and wanted to "bury". Then I became a University of Illinois Extension Master Gardener and learned a little about composting in my classes. The final step was discovering this website and learning how to build bins out of pallets which we had in abundance, and all about "browns" and "greens". Now I'm turning out some really great compost and I love everything about it.
Jan