Compost heaps don't need specific ingredients and there is no single correct way of making one. Anything that once lived can be composted. All your kitchen scraps, all your garden waste, junk mail and other paper, old wool or cotton clothes, feather bedding, pet detritus, etc You don't have to make the heap in one go. Just keep adding as you find stuff. Compost does not have to heat up and it does not have to be turned. When the bin is full turn it into a second bin or heap to continue to rot down and start again in the first.

I have buried kitchen scraps in the past and it works well. But, although my soil is workable all year round, I seldom have an empty square foot of ground to dig a hole in.

Thank you Floral, Do you worry about the inks on the junk mail? Old socks, I just threw some out. [g]

We are beyond turning a compost pile so all we normally do is collect passively in a couple of plastic bins. I just emptied one out to make the lasagna layers and I have one more to use.

I supposed I can empty the shredder into the bed too.

You sound very efficient in your garden, Floral. I have large raised beds and barely used them this past season so I have plenty of space to add ingredients to work in place. I’ll just leave myself a couple of beds to use for early spring.

I'll be emptying last year's composting toilet manure chamber in November. It'll be my second time at this house, and I think the second year we did a better job of using the finer sawdust and less coarse shavings and chips, so I hope this batch will be good compost. The chamber has been standing unused for one year. I'll pull it all out into compost bins nearby and then shift it to the garden in spring.

Meanwhile, I just scored 7 large sacks of fine sawdust, and all summer was bringing used coffee grounds from the burgeoning cafes in our touristy town. And I'll get leaves from a neighbor, since my own trees aren't big enough yet to produce much.

For cover material to throw down the toilet after every use, I mix coffee grounds and crumbled leaves into the sawdust, and it seems to do a great job of slightly precomposting. If we are using this mix in 2022, it'll be pulled out of the camber in 2024, so it'll be a while before I know how much of a difference it makes, but I'm sure it will be good compost.

I use almost entirely leaf compost, as our lot is 80% tree covered, about half of which actually drop leaves. Just pile 'em up, run a lawnmower over them, leave it in a moist pile for a month or two, and then transfer to 40-gallon trash cans. The piles heat up reasonably well. I have ten such cans full, which is a couple of yards. The trick is that most of our our leaves don't fall until December, and we start planting out for summer in February. So there isn't much time. But 9-month old cans are suitably degraded. So in the next few months, I have a lot of containers of compost to dig in to make room for the new stuff, as well as using it for mulch. Vastly less kitchen compost, and that mostly goes into containers. The water content of kitchen waste is a lot higher, so there isn't really that much there. Getting leaves from neighbors seems a straightforward proposition. As it is for leaves, I'd be surprised if paper products would compost promptly if not chopped up. Those may be better for lasagna in-situ composting areas.

As others have said, leaves will be abundant soon. If you want low cost options for other materials then look at a farm store. Softwood shavings used as animal bedding come in big bales around 5 dollars and they compost fairly quickly because of how thin they are. Nitrogen sources such as bags alfalfa pellets can also be found there pretty cheap.

Rodney

No, I don’t worry about inks.

I'd like to get some fresh horse manure to mix into my fall leaves w/ clippings so that they compost faster. As it is the leafs take a year and a half to compost. I'd have to haul them on top of the car, but 6 bags would be enough. But I'm afraid of my heart.

The only paper I compost is the coffee filters. If you've ever smelled a paper mill you wouldn't compost paper. And you'd also bypass the town.

I didn’t use printed material because of the inks. I guess I had enough stuff to compost without any paper. I always had beautiful compost from the leaves, woodshop shavings and kitchen waste.

I always wondered about using the waste from a compost toilet. But then, where we lived in Wisconsin, they sprayed the fields with the fresh waste from the septic trucks. Phew! but they did it all the time.

Vgkg - I was thinking this year I just might ask my neighbors for their bagged leaves. I know they don’t save them and I could really double the amount of compost I can make if I manage to collect and process them all.

HCDesert - Sawdust is a nice addition. I’ll have to ask around to contractor friends if they have sawdust they don’t want. I was thinking I might try to collect some seaweed along the coast too.

I usually have a lot of my own leaves, but last year we had so much wind and it blew all our leaves into other people’s yards before we could collect them. I missed the layer of mulch in the summer when we had drought.

Dan - We do run the mower over our leaves when they are on the lawn and then empty the bag onto the tops of the empty raised veg beds. I only have a 1/4 acre lot so the amount of leaves I end up with is limited.

I like the idea of putting them in trash cans to break down further to heat them quicker.

You have a long growing season, if you are raking in December and planting out in February!

Rodney - softwood shavings is an idea I hadn’t thought of. I’ll price them out. I love alfalfa pellets for the fertilizer effect. I swear by them for my roses.

John - No opportunities for horse manure here but that sounds wonderful if you can get it.

Kate - OMGosh - septic waste does not sound pleasant. Lol

prairie - Here's a link to a google search for horse boarding NY City. There's about 10 pins, many in Manhattan. If you can find it in NY City; I'd guess you can find it anywhere. Horse boarders are a good source because they don't plow it into their pastures and because, I would guess, They have to worry that they're taking care of someone else's horse. And might be more cautious with what they're putting into the horse/manure. If you do use it don't get any manure with wood chips in it. I don't have any experience with wood shavings or sawdust in manure, but I wouldn't experiment.