Composting can be as easy or as difficult as you care to make it. If you create a pile of "green" or high nitrogen material with "brown" or high carbon material, and add moisture, it will eventually turn into compost. Turning and mixing the pile to aerate and keeping it moist will speed up the process. You can build a bin for it, buy a commercial bin or tumbler, or just pile it up on the ground. But if you just pile it up and ignore it for a year or two it will also rot and become compost eventually, it just takes longer.

There are many good books available on the subject as well as a vast amount of information on the internet. If you google "composting" you will get thousands of hits. A good place to start is the FAQs on this forum. Florida's composting site is another good one.
http://www.compostinfo.com/

And if you follow this forum there is a lot to learn here, too. We have many very knowledgeable people here to help you along the way.

Karen

Here is a link that might be useful: FAQs

Any vegetative waste you plunk down as a mulch will, eventually, add organic matter to your soil. We make compost to take advantage of the nutrients in material that may not make a good mulch, ie. kitchen scraps, and use other material to fill that out. As organic waste is digested, by the bacteria that work in a compost pile or the bacteria and earthworms that live in the soil, any nutrients in that material is released for use by the plants growing in the soil.
Mulch is organic matter that is placed on the soil surface to aid in "weed" suppression, moisture retention, and keep the soil cool as well as to provide the soil bacteria with a steady diet that they will incorporate into the soil for future use. There should not be an either/or but you should compost and mulch.

To turn mulch into compost,
1. keep it moist, and
2. add greens.
Two of the most readily available free greens are coffee grounds (company policy at Starbucks is to offer Grounds for Gardens) and urine.
3. optional: turn the pile.
For fastest composting, you'd monitor the temperature and turn it after the temperature peaks, usually after a week the first time, then 4-5 days, then 3-4 days (longer in winter).

But mulch will also become compost if it's piled up and you do nothing else.

I pile mulch in my garden paths (4 to 8 inches deep or more), use it to mulch the garden plot after it has aged for a few months, and use it as a brown for the compost bin as needed. After the mulch has been in the paths a year, with only winter rains (unless I have seedlings or other pots in the paths that need regular watering), I can sift it and harvest some compost if I need it.

If your asking how to turm chips into compost the quickest, then you need to add greens to them. I can tell you from much experience, wood chips, even small ones, say 1/4" or so, take a while to compost. I have a 6" wood chipper and for me the best way to compost chips is to let it happen naturally. It requires too much greens to be added to the pile to speed it up, but my piles are 4 cubic yards or more.

I have a pile that has many greens added in the wood chips and after 14 months they still look like chips. Keeping chip only piles as wet as possible helps things along.

I prefere to add my greens to things that compost much easier such as leaves and shredded paper.

During the summer I needed to create tons of new bed space, as well as mulch over some cleared areas. I got a tree trimming co. to dump a truckload of rough wood chips adn spread it 6 or more inches thick, right over the grass. Just checked today, and the underside is moist even though we are in teh middle of a severe drought. There are big fat worms started to show up, eating the now-dead plant matter and the composting bottom layer of wood. I've even planted a few sturdy plants right into the bottom layer of wood chips and they are happy as peaches. Some things, like hostas, are delaying going dormant,probably because of the warmth of the rotting wood chips around their roots. All in all, very successful and less labor intensive (though slower to break down) than the lasagna beds I have done in the past. Will probably have to work rough compost in in the spring to add some nutrients, since the wood chips are going to take years to completely break down.