There are all kinds of ways to compost. Nature does it all the time, whether it is leaves falling from trees and rotting, you mulching grass when you mow and leaving it in your lawn to decompose, animals dying in the wild, or anyplace living plants or animals die and return to dirt. We just fancy it up with the name composting. However it happens, microbes are eating the organic stuff, using greens as energy to digest the carbon.
You can get as technical or as casual about it as you wish. Some people go to great lengths to mix just the right amount of greens (nitrogen) and browns (carbon), keep the moisture just right, and turn it regularly to be extremely efficient about it. Others just pile it up and forget about it for a long time. Many people are somewhere in between.
Those microbes need some moisture so they can eat the carbons. In Florida that should not be a problem for you. In the high desert where things are really dry it can take years if not longer for things to decompose. If it gets too wet it can go anaerobic. That means the bugs that don’t need oxygen to live take over. The compost can get slimy and stink. The quality of the final compost isn’t as good as aerobic composting either though it is better than nothing. Keeping the compost from getting too wet may be your biggest problem. As long as it drains fairly well it’s not too bad but it does need to dry out when it gets soaked.
What happens in “good” composting is that the bugs really heat the compost up when they are working hard. Sometimes you can even see it smoking, especially when you turn it. The center will get pretty hot, the bugs use up the stuff they eat, and the process greatly slows down so it cools off. When it’s hot, seeds in the middle get cooked so they won’t sprout, a good thing. If you turn it and get the good stuff on the outside into the middle it will heat back up, speeding up the composting process and cooking more seeds.
A barrel composter, a barrel up on a stand and with a handle so you can spin it, works really well for this. It’s a lot harder to turn a pile on the ground. You seldom get all the seeds to cook on the ground but the more you turn it the better you do. If all you compost is chicken manure, wood shavings, and kitchen scraps you don’t have to worry about seeds.
The chicken manure is the ”green”, the shavings are the ”brown”, and the kitchen scraps can be either. You want a balance of the browns and greens. Too many greens and it can go anaerobic on you. Too many browns and it can take a lot longer but will eventually get there.
As I said there are a lot of different ways you can do it. I have two bins, a working bin and a gathering bin. While a batch is working I put kitchen scraps, poop from my droppings board, garden wastes, and some grass clippings in the gathering bin. I also pile up some garden wastes like old sweet potato vines, bean stalks, okra stalks, finished pepper or tomato plants, waste stuff from the garden that I don’t feed my chickens, all the debris from the garden nearby so it is available. I thinned my peach and apple trees yesterday, removing excess peaches and apples so they don’t break down the tree limbs, and dumped those in the storage side. When one batch is finished I strain it through a half-inch mesh and store it in empty chicken feed bags.
When I start my next batch I layer some of those dried garden stalks, stuff from the storage bin, and grass trimmings to get a good mix. I’ll scrape my droppings board and add whatever pure poop I have in there. For the first month or so after I start a new batch I’ll put any pure poop from the droppings board on the new batch but after that it goes in the storage side. If that pure poop gets too thick and gets wet, it can draw flies and maybe even stink some. One trick I’ve learned is to cover a pile of pure poop with grass clippings to keep the flies off. That really helps with the smell too.
I don’t turn it nearly enough, usually just once or twice. Yeah, I have some grass seed problems because of that but the compost is still great stuff in the garden.
That’s just how I do it. There are plenty of better ways. You might check out the sister gardening site. You don’t have to join though you are of course welcome, just browse and see what they say about it. There is a specific section on composting with a lot of information in it.
http://www.theeasygarden.com/forums/composting-soil-building.15/
As I said, you can make this as hard and complicated as you wish or you can be pretty laid back about it. The main thing is to try to keep it from staying too wet.
Good luck!
