Shoes don't compost quickly. Somehow, a new-in-box pair of dress shoes wound up in the compost pile. I just keep tossing them into the new pile when I come across them. At last sighting, the box and tissue paper are gone. The shoes are losing some of the shine, but are still intact.

Now that's a new one!

I compost expert friend of mine once tried composting jeans and shirts. Fully compostable IF they are 100% cotton. Turns out they sometimes use synthetic blends on only some of the thread - going one direction (the warp or the weft, if I have my terms right). So what you get out is a ghost of the original fabric with only the synthetic threads all going in the same direction.

I keep hearing about people composting dryer lint...while I am well into the "compost it if you can" camp, I'm not sure of the benefits of keeping my dryer lint out of the landfill.

Not knowing any better years ago, I used to throw dryer sheets in the pile. Those things looked exactly the same years later. . I don't put them in there any more

+1 on keeping dryer sheets out of the piles lol.. I always found eggshells to take forever until I started making a nice slurry in the blender with a bit of water.. Although still a "slow release" form of calcium (if you will), it's much faster than leaving them whole..

Agree with tox's findings on the clothing. My husband's old shirts and ripped jeans go in. All I find is the synthetic fibers , buttons, zippers, etc.

Peanut shells and avocado skins compost very slowly for me, but I use the "lazy" method and am in no hurry. Mussel shells seem to last forever! No problem with dryer sheets - we get compostable ones. Back when I kept hot compost piles almost everything decomposed quickly. Used to love a challenge, once composted a complete Austin phone book (remember those?)

no Costco, Tox?

Bottle corks, and I do mean the natural ones.

The blades from my blender were in the compost heap for over a year and for some reason didn't rot at all. Now they're back in the blender and working fine.

How long it takes a substance to be digested by the bacteria in a compost pile depends on many factors including density (ie. wood chips), size of the particle, the C:N ratio in the pile, and some others we may not be aware of yet.

Sod, mostly dirt, can be tough for the bacteria since it so closely resembles the environment they live in, soil.

kimmq is kimmsr

OTOH ... bunnies, pigeons, doves, quail and the occasional hummingbird compost quickly. If I find a corpse, I bury it in the middle of the pile.

people ... need a bigger pile.

this is the thread to make all urine threads incredibly quaint.

The worms crawl in,
the worms crawl out

<backs slowly out of the room, cringing>

I'm a huge proponent for hot composting, but some folks just take it a bit too far haha

So I'm guessing no one wants to come over for a beer and take a close look at the large tumblers? ;-)

Are you using an old Amantillado cask for a tumbler by any chance?

Scary place this is!

Brassica stalks don't want to break down for me hot pile or not.

Brassica Stalks have a lot of fibers so they take a very long time to break down similar to wood.

Smashing them first should help. With the back of a shovel, hammer, etc.

@jessicaw - cut those buttons off and save them in a coffee can so when you're old you'll have coffee cans of buttons to pass on to future generations. heehee Seriously though if you're a rag user (which I am, lots of shop work and I hate disposables), cut off buttons and toss them into ziplocks by color and size. When you lose a button you'll have an impressive collection to choose from. It's worked several times at our house. I love shopping at my own general store.

Tox that is entirely too much work! I prefer to let the critters break down the clothes and pull out the remnants when they're done. Good idea though...

Hey Lloyd, what beer are you serving?

Labatts Blue....a great Canadian beer. Could probably pick up some Labatts Blue Light (we call it training beer) for y'all.

What, no Oatmeal Stout up there? No porter? Ya think we're lightweights down here don't ya son. I would drink Labatt's though, regular or light, because I'm a very polite guest. And don't get behind me when I'm peering into the tumbler.

Oatmeal is for sissies. No fancy pants beers around this farm.

(Actually didn't even know there was such thing, I had to google it to see if you was pulling my leg)

Looks like your fellow Canadian composters came up with their own

http://www.cityfarmer.info/2014/11/10/city-farmers-cream-of-the-crop-pollinator-ale/

I would totally drink that stuff and contribute the processed product to their compost pile. I have a hop vine myself - those things are amazing. One year it grew up a downspout and came out the gutter two stories up. :-o

Palm fronds take forever....

Pine needles I have a hard time with, but citrus, I microwave them first and they go very easy, but I am hot composting. You can even boil, just heat them up. Palm fronds I would not even try, I can tell they would be a nightmare to compost.

Tough or waxy leaves like palm, I would consider chopping with a machete into pieces a few inches long. The chopping lets the microbes in past the waxy surface, AND if they don't compost very fast, they are small enough that you don't mind them in the finished product. Whereas if you put them in whole, you'll find long annoying strands in the compost later. A $10 machete from the Army Surplus store is well worth it. Watch your fingerz.

Machetes may be cheap, but artificial limbs'll run ya.

I could probably do a limb quicker than six months and a digit even faster!

It is not a technique for those who are...inaccurate.

Why am I hearing that in Hannibal Lecter's voice?

"It is not a technique for those who are...*inaccurate*, Clarice."

I just got me a machete from Machete Specialists. It is MUCH sharper than my $8 machete. Good thing I got to practice for years with the dull one. The reed patch in my orchard is history now.

tropical_thought wrote:

>Pine needles I have a hard time with....

Roger that.... Is there anything to accelerate the decomposition of pine needles? We were OD'ed on pine needles this year - like I've never seen in 35 years. Had to clean the bloody gutters *seven* times....

Now I don't cut the grass so much as harvest the lawn. But even after going through the shredder/mower - with plenty of N mixed in - these things just don't compost. And yeah, I 'recycle' my beer....

Cheers

There exists a place called Machete Specialists?

What a time to be alive. :-D

I was in Home Depot recently and was awestruck to see one of these:

http://www2.fiskars.com/Products/Gardening-and-Yard-Care/Machetes-and-Billhooks/Billhook-13

I really wanted to get one, just to be able to answer the door casually holding it.

hey tox, is like working for years with a poor spading fork, then you buy a serious one, and whoa. I am at an age where I appreciate the smaller energy expenditure associated with quality tools. This machete cuts everything. Theparsley, I have a preacher coming to my door every saturday morning. I am so naive and feel it is unpolite to slam the door in their face, so I talk to them, but then they come back. do you think opening the door with the machete will help express my feelings? confused in MI.

Well, I am at an age where I appreciate the smaller energy expenditure associated with not trying to be nice.

"I am so naive and feel it is unpolite to slam the door in their face"

Lol... It isn't polite to slam the door in their face.

As one of the people who do such a Ministry work, I would say... hand them the machete and tell them you'll talk while they work lol.

One time I went to a door with a friend, and a knife was pulled on him. It was an intense situation. It wasn't a machete lol, but it was still hairy.

Surely there is some reasonable medium between tolerating unwanted conversations and waving a machete. In today's world we seem to be losing touch with the reasonable middle.

I may be taking this too seriously though. :-D Have you tried chucking compost at them?

What? ...and waste perfectly good compost? ;-)

Best story in this regard is the one a friend tells about his mom who passed away many years ago. He had five siblings and mom had to take the whole crew to the supermarket. Needless to say, there was squabbling between several, others were whining "BUY ME THIS," while a couple were aggressively trying to wander off. At this precise moment, she was accosted by a pair of pamphlet-bearing evangelicals.

"Madam, do you know what hell is?"

She took a moment, looked down a the swirling vortex of chaos at her feet, and replied:

"Yes."

what gets me is that they always park in front of my house and start making rounds. I am always the first. however, they are like clock work and I just know not to answer the door Sat. mornings at 10 am.

Has anyone mentioned those sticky labels that are on fruit & veggies? It seems they last forever.

Yes and they will either not come off the fruit, or will come off at the most inopportune times and stick to the most inappropriate things. There seems to be an urban myth that they are edible which is not the case.

Before we met, my wife went to Mexico on a mission trip with a priest and a group of other college kids. She got sick on seafood and had just finished barfing on the sidewalk a moment earlier, at a discreet distance from the group, when a young man approached her to ask if she was Saved. Fr. John politely stepped in to basically say "Yes, and now is not the time anyway, dude." I wish he had had a more clever rejoinder like "She's worshipping at another throne, son." In any case he later married us and they still love to tell that story 30 years later.

I never heard that fruit stickers were supposedly edible. That said, I suppose if you swallowed one by accident, it would not be worth worrying about.

When I was a little kid, I loved apples, and also couldn't quite see the point of leaving the core, so I typically ate the whole thing, including swallowing the seeds. But back then, when the crust of the earth was still cooling, stickers on fruit had not been invented yet. Kids surely must swallow the stickers all the time, as well as some of us klutzy adults.

I guess they haven't figured out an economical way to make the stickers biodegradable and yet durable through all the vicissitudes of packing, shipping, storage, display etc. I seem to remember reading, once, that producers were looking at labeling produce with nontoxic inks, printed directly on the produce. It sounds like a good idea, but I can imagine the technical challenges would be much, much greater than just printing labels and sticking those on.

Found one of the shoes I was talking about this summer! Nothing left but the sole,

Another cool compost find that is OT were 2 silver coins I found this fall. I bought them for my kids last Christmas, but couldn't find them when it was time to wrap gifts. It seems they got taken out to the compost heap.