On composting in the cold

Even your compost needs a break sometimes.

Me - inside, because it’s cold out.

We are in the dead of winter. Even in Los Angeles, it’s cold.

Often winter’s bleakness is buoyed by the sense of renewal that comes with a new year. Something has ended, which makes room for something else to begin, with all its attendant optimism and opportunity. But the days are cold, my home is cold, the sun goes down early, the world is frightening, and I’ve found the sense of transition that I usually enjoy around this time to be eerily absent. My life remains continuous; fundamentally changed in some ways, but also exactly the same. It’s weird sometimes.

Contemplating this while I worked the compost at my community garden this week, I noticed that my piles were also a little low energy. It has been cold. The pace of decomposition has slowed to a crawl. The heat of the piles dissipates quickly, discharging into the air in sighs of sleepy steam. Food scraps linger for weeks that, in warmer seasons, would have disappeared in days. This made me reconsider my expectations for the season. In compost work, winter is for resting. Everything slows down. Renewal doesn’t come until spring, when the days get longer and the earth warms up, and decomposition—and its accompanying cycle of regeneration—can begin again. So I figured that I might stay cold for a little while longer. It’s okay to be sleepy, not particularly filled with hope right now, and to keep myself in hibernation.

In conclusion, the way we want to treat our composts in cold weather mimics how we might best treat ourselves. Primarily, with patience. Your compost does not have to operate on a schedule and neither (necessarily) do you. Many folks I know simply cover their compost and let it sleep through the winter, knowing that it’ll wake back up for the spring. Periods of stasis will not disrupt or harm the pile. In fact, they may offer vital nourishment—the stillness that precedes great vigor.

If you do want to continue composting through cold weather, though, there are a few smart and simple things you can do to coax along your own little project of concentrated decomposition.

• Insulate your compost pile with straw, wood chips, or some other carbon-heavy and porous material. This may require you to shovel your pile out of a bin, line the bine, and then reload things. It’s worth it. The insulation will help minimize the heat that your compost pile is losing, which will keep decay more active.

• Cover your pile. If it’s going to be raining or snowing a lot, that excessive moisture may “drown” your pile. If you don’t normally cover your pile, lashing a tarp over it or putting up a lid of some sort will help keep your pile the right amount of dry.

• Make sure your pile is the right size. Very Goldilocks conundrum here. A pile that is too big will get heavy under its own weight, compact its materials, and lose airflow—which will significantly slow decomposition. A pile that is too small will lose its heat to the surrounding atmosphere and that risks dropping the temperature, too. 3x3x3 is considered the best size for maintaining airflow for a pile without losing too much heat.

• Invest in preparing your inputs. The more you chop and shred stuff before you add it to your compost, the more you’re helping out the microbes in your pile. You’re giving them more surface area to penetrate, more quickly. When things are cold and slow, every extra millimeter of exposed material counts.

• Don’t worry about turning. If your pile is freezing solid, you obviously don’t need to stress about turning it. (What are you gonna do, anyway, rotate a block of ice?) In fact, you can skip turning the whole winter long without any detriment to your compost.

• Accept slowness. No matter what you do, your pile is going to slow down during winter. Just relax and let it take the time it needs. It’s okay.

<3 Cass