Composting: Nature's Most Interesting Process

Hey, everybody, Chuck here with another edition of our think Spring playlist, and right now this is something you should all be doing, which is composting, and you can learn a thing or two about it in this episode. Composting colon Nature's most interesting process. It's really not too hard and it really means a lot, so give it a shot.

Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from HowStuffWorks dot com.

Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh the Man Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and I think I'm neglected to say last time you did. Guest producer Nola is with us.

That's right. So if you listen to the Shroud of Turin episode and.

You're like, man, that's not was great.

Yeah, that was no thanks.

Nol this.

Show. Today, I've been replaying my one of my favorite Simpsons jokes ever, it's over and over in my head.

I laughed already just hearing Simpsons jokes.

It was from the one of the Halloween episodes when they did the Nightmare on Elm Street riff, these old old ones where groundskeeper Willie was Freddy Krueger and he turned into a I think like a shred or attractor or something and ran over people or something, sure, and said, uh, when you'd when you'd done, When I'm done, they're gonna need to do a compost border them.

Oh wow, that is a bad joke.

Yeah, it was really good one of the I mean, the Simpsons didn't get too punny, but that was a that was a good one.

Well, anything goes on a treehouse before.

Yeah, you know, agreed.

So you know, there's a bunch of cities that have kind of gotten woke to the idea that we should be recycling or composting our food. Did you know that? Sure, I saw a stat that said something like forty percent of food gets wasted. But I got suspicious because I also saw that forty percent of the stuff that goes to municipal landfills or trash is food waste, which doesn't necessarily mean it's wasted food, because I don't think you would count like a banana peel as food waste. Is

They're not counting food. Packaging is food.

No, But I think they're counting everything that has to do with food that could conceivably be eaten as wasted food, which is not the same as food waste. The point is, the legitimate stat that I saw just about everywhere is that if you took all the garbage that the United States rose away into a landfill, forty percent of that is food waste. And I'm sure some of it is a whole cake some complete moron through a whole cake away for no good reason.

I was on a diet.

Well that's actually a pretty good reason. But you know what I'm saying, forty percent of all that trash is food. The problem is you might say, well, who cares trash? It decomposes. That's great, that's true. It does decompose, But in the landfills that the United States uses, we make sure they're anaerobic. Oxygen doesn't get down there, so a whole different decomposition process takes place, and in a landfill, in anaerobic decomposition, methane is produced. And methane is bad news.

So good, the old shoe tree. Sure, uh, yeah, it's We've danced around this a lot. We Well, you just referenced our and I don't like to tootor on horns a lot, But that Landfills episode was great.

Landfills, and don't forget the plasma incinerator one.

Yeah.

Great. Basically any of our waste management ones.

Are yeah, what else I think gorilla gardening. We touched on this sum and a couple of others. We've mentioned composting and to the extent where I thought we had done one on composting, not yet, but we had not until about five and a half minutes ago. And that's a guess. So if you write and say like.

It was eight minutes, chuck, you're grounded.

So, like you mentioned, we did, I don't think these numbers are accurate anymore. But we generate, let's just say, a lot of millions of tons, hundreds of millions of tons of trash, and about twenty five to thirty percent of that is recovered through recycling, which includes composting, which is good. But that number, if it was seventy percent, would be amazing.

Does it include composting that that recycling number? Yeah, oh okay, yeah, if it be seventy it'd be great.

Yeah, eighty, why not, Yeah, let's shoot for ninety.

Well, supposedly Seattle itself has a goal of something like sixty to seventy percent of all of its trash being recycled by the end of the year.

Of course they do, because Seattle does it right.

And they actually have compulsory mandatory composting now, like you have to compost if you live in the city of Seattle.

Why don't I live there?

I don't know, I don't know. I asked myself that a lot.

You know. Emily and I went for our two shows ago on that lovely spring weekend.

Oh it was gorgeous and.

We stayed extra in Seattle and after we were like, we're moving here. That's it.

It's a great town.

I've said it before on the show Dogs and Bars. That was all it took.

Yeah, Dog Bartenders, but.

Again, Dog's plain poker again. It's easy to fall in love Seattle on a perfect weekend in April.

Yeah, I hear it rains there a lot, though.

I'd still live there. That's a great place. And you know what, you may see us again this year Seattle. Tease.

Tease, You're such a tease, all right.

So composting is great for a thousand reasons, but one first and foremost is that it's not hard to do and it's not expensive to do. No, if you just want to be And there are many different levels of composting, from big city programs to the home farmer that takes it super seriously to just if you just want to lessen the impact a little bit on your landfill, your local landfill, feel like you're doing the right thing, and get a little bit of nutrient rich goodness fertilizer to use.

Yeah, this is all. This is all you need organic waste. And we don't even mean something that is like organic. We mean like organic meaning it's composed mostly of carbon. It was once alive at one point, right.

Yeah, and I made a poopy noise, which you can't use poop.

So no, that's night soil.

That's the opposite of what I should have done.

What's a banana Soundoo? That's a banana sound right?

You need soil, you need water, you need air or oxygen.

Right. So the organic waste is the stuff you're going to have broken down, which in this case, in the case of a compost pile, is food the.

Soil well partially sure, but.

No, no, it's food for the things that are in the soil, yes, right, it's an energy source, yes, yes, and nutrient source for what's in the soil. So you add soil. When you're adding soil, you're basically adding starter culture to the compost. What you're doing is grabbing microbes from say in your yard, and putting them on the compost pile and say, dinner's ony.

They eat and poop, yes, but you don't want to poop in it.

You need a little bit of water, like you said, to keep it moist, but you don't want to keep it over wet, because microbes like slightly moist soil and then air because again again this is really really important. You can let your compost pile degrade anaerobically, but it's going to produce methane, which is bad for the for the environment, bad for your neighbors, bad for your neighbors, bad for you. It's gonna stink, it might blow up,

Yeah, it's really easy. So what you're going to end up with the end, like we said, is really fertilizer. But it's uh, it's called humus. Don't call it hummus.

No, that's different.

That's two m's right. Uh, this has just one M. And those little microorganisms in there, they're going to break this stuff down. They're gonna eat it, they're gonna poop it out and going to multiply, and there's gonna be we'll talk about the critters a little more later, but there're gonna be different critters along the way that eat those critters than critters that eat those critters. And it's gonna get really hot up in there. It might steam,

There's actually a food web in there. There's a lot of physics and chemistry that's going on. It is very neat. I'm fascinated by it too. But the upshot of composting is that you're taking something and it's being broken down into its constituent parts so that it can be reused by plants and the whole circle of life can start over again.

Yeah, you're sort of just accelerating the natural process of like.

Rot, you're optimizing it.

Yeah, like you mentioned a passive composter, which is to say, you know, lazy hippies, you could just throw all that junk out of your window if you want it in a big pile and throw your some grass clippings on and throw uh, throw your your fall leaves on there. Just leave it there, and that thing will eventually compost itself.

Well again, it'll produce methane. You'll blow up, or you can.

You know, you could turn it every now and then and maybe avoid that.

But uh no, I think that makes it an active pile.

Well, uh, slightly active pile then, right, I don't mean like every other day just to avoid methane.

Maybe, but that would still technically be an active pile. It'd be a poorly managed active pile. Slightly active, poorly managed. So I'm serious, that's what they call it.

I know, Okay, I've just we'd like to make up our own names for things. I didn't know you were going to cease that, and oh I was in your nine I gotcha.

Sorry, we'll call that the doobie pile.

Okay, no, it's called active management.

I just wanted to make sure that we got it on the record.

So the big goal here is to reduce your waste. They say in this article ultimately will save you tax money because your landfill won't.

I thought that was hilarious.

Yeah, I mean, don't count on seeing any any tax breaks coming anytime soon.

But that got William F. Buckley's attention.

Probably, So so do you how do you do this? Let's say you want to start composting. Hmm, there's a one, two, three, four, five step process to get this thing going.

Okay, well, let's talk about them.

The first thing you want to do is just pick out the place you want to do it right, because it's, you know, it's a bit of a mess.

It's it doesn't have to be necessarily, but depending on your neighbors, they might be like, well, great, I'm glad you started an unsightly pile of kitchen rubbish. Yeah, in food waste that I can see from my deck. Thanks a lot for that. So that's something you want to keep in consideration. Apparently, even if you do have a very well managed active pile, what would you call.

That I'm not making up funny name. No more jokes.

Ruined it it still it still may stink here there. Sure, so you want it kind of away from the house, but not so far away that if you're feeling lazy, you're not going to go out and tend to it on a daily or every other dayly basis.

Yeah. And if you have that much land that you have a compost pile a mile from your house, good for you. Yes, sure you got some acreage. There might be some local rules, either from your hoa heaven forbid if you have to belong to one of those, or maybe just your municipality might have rules and regulations.

Yeah, so check with them first. Sure, that's what everyone does before they start a compost pile. They go down to city hall and say, what tell me the rules and regulations surrounding composting in my yard?

Now, I think the first thing everyone does is start throwing their eggshells out the window. Sure, that's how it all starts. It's like, I'm tired of these things being in my trash. They recommend downwind because, like you said, it might stink a bit. Sun is good in a way, but you don't want it baking in the sun all.

Day, No, because it'll dry it out. Remember you want it to be kind of moist, yes, and the sunlight can actually dry it out. Sure, so you want apparently the best place to put it is under a deciduous tree.

Good spot.

Yeah, because in the winter time there's no leaves on the tree, so the sun's going to keep it warm when it's cold. But during the summer it's going to be shaded by the tree, so it won't dry out. It's just perfect. It is a deciduous tree equals love.

Wind is good to provide little air, but you don't want it blowing, scattering the stuff all over the place, drying it out. Again, No good. What else? Drainage? Don't start one in that old baby pool that you don't want to throw.

Out, especially if your baby's in there.

Yeah, you want good drainage. Like generally you build either build a bin. We'll talk about this stuff actually right now. Yeah, but it's off the ground. Sure, it's on legs. Yeah, although you can't have a pile, right, but you know, generally you want to you want to build a bin or buy a bin, right, And those things sit off the ground, right because of drainage.

That's part of it for sure. Yeah, you also want dirt rather than say like a concrete pad or something like that.

Yeah, don't compost in your driver, Right, it's not a good idea.

As far as structures go. You can, like you said, you can go buy one. They're not very expensive from what I understand, right, Yeah, it depends on the size. You can also say go buy some cinder blocks and build something like that. Sure, But basically you can cut compost structures into two. There's a single bin and there's a three bind system. So in the single bin system, you put new stuff on top, new and appeals. This is what I think of when I think composting.

You know bananabul.

Sure, Yeah, you put new stuff on top, and then you take a pitchfork or shovel or something like that and you work, you work it in to the compost. And at the bottom of this structure, say it's open, when you're walking up to it, the finished compost will accumulate at the bottom. And the reason it accumulates at the bottom is because it's a finer, finer grain. Yeah, and that's it. Single bin new stuff at the top,

Yeah, And when we're talking structure like that, if you want to build one, you know, build a wood frame and it's like got chicken wire walls and a chicken wire bottom, and that gives you the air and if you've got something to collect it underneath, it's going to fall. You know, when it's small enough, right, some other stuff might follow. You may need to add it back in.

Yeah.

But with the three bin system, you've got, well you've got three bends, you've got the starter stuff, you got the once it starts to break down, little stuff, and then you have the more finished product, right, and you have to actively manage that system.

Yeah, that say some sounds unnecessarily difficult, kind of like it, Oh you're a three bin guy.

Well, we're about to get into this for real. We've been lazily composting for a while, but we're we're doing our whole backyard like we're getting rid of our grass.

Basically, what are you going to do?

Compost mulch and beds and plants and herbs.

And zerouscape cackdye in and all that.

No cackdye though we do have a palm tree. We've had that forever though, you yeah, just getting rid of the grass basically.

Because it takes up so much water.

It's just it's not good grass to begin with, and I'm not the best about cutting it. Lawn mowers are terrible.

Plus you don't water enough. You never let a quarter inch of water accumulate exactly.

Yeah, just and you know it'll look nicer. So part of this in this company that's doing it is it's not just a landscaping company. They're they're a there're a bunch of hippies. So they're they're designing it in such a way that that feeds itself. And part of that is composting. Gotcha, anyway, long, long way of saying, we're going to start, like for real composting very shortly.

And you're going with the three bin structure.

I don't know. I think I'm going to build it. It's well, it's the structure Emily tells me to build. Okay, that's the easiest way to say it.

Got yeah.

Uh, But if you buy one, like you were saying, there's all different kinds just you know, look, look it up online or go to a hardware store, and you know, many of them will look like a big barrel on legs and it literally turns like has a crank on it to where you can turn this thing in circles. It's old timing, so you don't have to use a pitchfork at all. Right, you don't have to must your hands or your hair.

It's like a bingo yeah, spinner, but with banana picks.

Have you ever played bingo, like legit bingo in a room with hundreds of people, not hundreds, well more than like you and you me, yes, like a bingo parlor? Is that what they're called. Yeah.

I've actually gone to a couple of like senior retirement homes and helped out with bingo. Wow, And that's a pretty pretty cool experience actually, because.

Do you run the bingo?

It's, uh, you just play kind of qualified to run the bingo right right, just walk around and point out if somebody missed one that they you know that was called that kind of thing, But did you want to talk about taking it seriously? Do they?

Oh?

My god?

And then you have to be a certified bingo master to run the show.

Yeah, and they'll like tell you to hurry up and like shout if you're if you're not like loud enough or fast enough or going too fast like.

So, the point is not to have fun, you know, the point is to win. Wow, what do they win their prizes?

Yeah? Nothing much usually, I mean, but you can, I think, like you can play bingo and casinos for thousands and thousands of dollars. Yeah, usually at old folks homes. They don't, you know, sure there's not thousands of dollars prizes like honey and nugarettes, right right, exactly?

All right, Well let's take a break here after we have talked structure and uh, we'll talk a little bit about what you want what kind of junk you want to throw in that pile?

All right, chuck, So we're talking what you want to throw on the pile.

Right, You got your ben either a triple three banger, got your site or single. You got your site.

You bribed your neighbor to look the other way.

Your neighbor exactly. You bought a goat.

Oh man, talk about green living.

My neighbor has goats now like five of them?

Are they loud?

No?

Oh, that's great.

Everyone's a while to hear them, but it's a joy to hear. So it's not like it's not like a rooster.

Do you wake up and look out and say morning satan.

No, Well, goat's one of my favorites, so it's kind of nice to have them around.

Are they baby goats or adult goat?

No, they're big ones. I mean she got them to maintain their property because she was tired of cutting. I guess she didn't want to zero escape it, so she bought goats. Right, anyway, it's it's awesome. Kitchen waist Josh, that's what you want to throw in there?

Well, yeah, that's the first one. That's the one that everybody says. That's why you compost, right, Yeah, and yeah banana peals everybody knows that. But did you also know you can compost apple cores in orange rindes.

You can also eat apple cores.

Yeah, you believe there is no such thing as a core, right, because there's not seeing people who leave their apple corese left over. They can compost those things. Those are the easy ones. You can also do coffee grounds.

Yeah, that's a good one.

Paper filters, throw that filter and all in there. Well, okay, so let's just say I ate maybe a whole pizza to myself. I've got a couple of napkins wadded up. What do I do with those? Chuck?

Uh? I think you can throw those napkins in there, Josh.

Isn't that crazy?

It is crazy.

Newspaper Yeah, corn cobs if you still.

Read a newspaper, if you get your news on the internet, throw your laptop in there. Watermelon rds, yeah, seeds, leaves, you know, the butt end of the asparagus that no one cooks. Throw that junk in there.

You can also do yard waste too, sure, right, so you've got grass clippings, which we'll talk about in a second. We've got a couple of warnings as far as grass clippings goes.

Not too much.

But like let's say you're raking leaves or something like that. Throw some leaves on there.

Yeah, good crunchy brown ones.

And you can also throw like trimmings from your like shrubs, if you trim your woody shrubs. Okay, the key here is this, chuck. You want to cut all this stuff up in small bits.

Yeah, don't throw a whole corn cob in there. You can.

Your compost pile will just throw it right back out.

Yeah, it'll just spit it right back out right. Very funny. It'll make a burping noise. Yeah, they say to shred the corn cob. I don't have a corn cob shredder.

I don't either.

I've never thought about that.

I wouldn't waste like my blender blade on chopping up corn cobs. I think the point is that's breaking into a little piece of Sure, you can break it into little pieces though.

Yeah, you probably cut a corn cob up.

Yeah, and you can also, like you can take all this stuff and chop it. Anything you can put in a smaller pieces the better. Yeah, because, as we'll see, what you're really doing is you're not just breaking it up. You have to look at it like what you're doing is increasing the surface area. Some more microbes can work on it at once.

Yeah, Like if if you have I know you hate broccoli, butli you cut the little florettes off and you've got that big green broccoli stalk. Yeah, cut that thing up as small as you can, set it on fire you have patience for, and throw that junk in there.

Yeah, basically channel your inner anal chef Chris, you remember him.

The anal chef. Yeah, was that a real thing?

Yeah? Insert live Phil Hartman. No, I don't remember anal retain of chef. Oh okay, I forgot the retentive part.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember, big qualifier. It's like, I don't get that joke.

Mommy, remember the anal retain of chef?

Yeah, I do remember that.

Now. He'd like start to if he was dicing like green peppers and one of them was bigger than the rest, he'd just be like, okay, well, you want to take those chunks and you want to put them into a paper towel, and then you want to fold that up, and then you put that into some aluminum foil. You fold that up, and you put that in a paper bag and you roll it up and then you staple it and then you throw it away.

Boy man, that was Oh still makes me sad. So you mentioned newspaper earlier. If you live near the ocean and you've got your hands on some seaweed or some kelp, you can rinse that stuff off, right, So you don't want all that salt content in there. No, but it's really good and nutrient rich if you rinse that off and put it in your compost pile.

Yeah, and it's also good for you to eat too. I know I sound nuts, but just eat that stuff. What do you mean people, it's so good for you?

Yeah? Sawdust?

Do you know I eat that?

No? But like I'm building my compost, man, I can put that saldust back in it. How about that?

Yeah?

Pretty neat circle of life.

Baby?

What should not you compost night soil which is poopy soil?

Yep?

And you don't go take a big dumpos No, no you want to.

No, that's not good.

No.

Diseased garden plants, that's a big one.

Yeah.

Some of this stuff, though, as we'll find, doesn't quite make sense. But it's just good to err on the side of garbage in garbage out, except with compost. If you put garbage garbage in, then it's going to be really bad. If you put good, healthy garbage in, it's going to come out as is quite good. So you don't want to put any disease plants in there. Invasive weeds are another one too.

Yeah, but it says you can also put weeds in there, So I guess you just need to figure out which ones are the bad ones.

Yeah, So this specifically calls out buttercups, morning glory, and quack grass. I'm quite sure that there's plenty of seeds that wouldn't survive the composting process. Yeah, but apparently these do. So stay away from the quack grass.

Yeah, that was I think that was the big mantrat woodstock.

Sure it's a gateway drug.

Don't have the yellow sunshine or the quack grass.

It was the brown the brown ass brown acid, which I mean, who about the brown acid? You know?

And what about you're talking about kitchen stuff? What about meat and dairy?

Oh okay, that's that's controversial.

It is because Emily has taken classes and they were like, no, don't use any of that.

Yeah, that's like animal cells and fats in particular, they putrefy, they don't decompose, and putrefaction makes some stinky stuff, and I think it can also generate a lot of disease bearing pathogens. So I was surprised to see this article say yeah, yeah, put it in there.

Well, And they kind of said in this article, if if you're really heavily managing this thing, you can do it. But I don't know, I've just heard don't.

They said, turn it into a slurry, which I don't want to see freud Rich's blender at home fat slurry groas with corn cob leavings on it. But he said, whip it up into a slurry, and as long as it's a good, hot, actively managed pile, it'll it won't be a problem. I'm gonna go ahead and say, I don't think you should do that. Okay, I don't know what to do with the animal leavings, but I don't think you should compost it.

All right, it might make sense to you to say, hey, I have an outdoor fire pit. I bet that would be great in my composter.

No incorrect, Although this specifically says charcoal ashes. I think that's any kind of charred ashes.

Yeah, like burnt wood is called charcoal.

So are you sure? Because I know what you just said was true. But supposedly the entire Amazon basin, and I learned this from the Greatest Book of All Time fourteen ninety one by Charles C. Mann. The entire was on basin. It was a managed forest that the indigenous peoples down there had made completely fertile and feakend by instead of slash and burn, they were using slash and char techniques, and there was way more carbon locked into the charred tree stumps than there was the ashes, so

You know, I'm going to back off of my determined stance because I don't know.

It would make sense if it was coal, like if it.

Was like charcoal briquettes, whcause they have cement and all sorts of chemicals and junk in them.

But if it's charred wood or would ash I wonder. All right, well, somebody let us know, Charles C. Mann, tell us.

The pesticide treated plants. You you know, you know my stance on pesticides period, don't use them. But if you do, definitely don't put that stuff in there. Because your whole thing here is you want to you want a more or less organic compost pot right in the end.

And so one of the things that people love about composts is it actually is organic. And we're going to explain how. I didn't know this until we did this research, but we'll explain how because we're going to go through the process that your compost pile undergoes.

Right after this shit, all right, I did something we rarely do which is look something up as we're podcasting, because it just sounded lazy.

To be like, oh, we don't know this one. Gardenslive dot com says wood ashes are so strongly alkaline that it doesn't take a lot to upset the balance in the pile and stop the processing. You can add a very small amount of wood ash from like your fireplace or wood burning stove, but apparently not much. So okay, I think you know, like you're kind of right in that it's it's not completely fore boting, but but it sounds like too much is not a good thing.

I think that's what Freuden was just saying, like, don't even mess with it, okay, put in animal fats instead.

Well, and that's what the person from gardens Alive was saying, is like, it's so little that it's not really going to make a difference. And if you're trying to get rid of it in a different way, right, She's like, it's not really gonna matter.

But the but it raises a great question, Chuck, why in the name of all things holy would it matter what the alkalinity is of your compost pile? And I'll tell you why.

Because it's a chemistry experiment.

It is. It's a it's a chemistry experiment, but it's also a biological experiment. You have a microcosm growing there, and there's actually really easy things you can do to optimize this and basically create a XANADU pair dice for the the microbes and primary and secondary and tertiary consumers of this stuff that you're putting in there to break down so that they just have the greatest life that any invertebrate or microbe ever had.

All right, should we talk chemistry a bit then come back to just the management and stuff.

Huh?

All right, what you're really talking about here. For an ideal composting scene, you need a disco ball, right, and you need a proper c in ratio, which is carbon to nitrogen ratio. And depending on how wonky you want to get, if you want to start measuring things, you can do that. But from what I gather, just try and do a lot too, a little about thirty to one carbon to nitrogen r and eyeball it.

When the rule of thumb is this, if it's green and recently deceased and by green, like a nice banana peel, would qualify as this. Right, if it's pliable and green or you know, again recently deceased, it is high in nitrogen. If it's brown and dried, it's high in carbon. So you want to actually when you're adding the compost, you want to just kind of layer this stuff in about

Yeah, that's is that where the methane starts creeping in.

That actually leads to ammonia gas. Okay, But you also don't want too much carbon either, Yeah, because so carbon and nitrogen. Carbon is like the building block, and it's an energy source for these microbes. Nitrogen is essential to their growth and their metabolic activity as well. Yeah, but when they have this in these concentrations, that's when they flourish.

Yeah. And the other problem with carbon too is it's just that it breaks down so slowly.

Well, it depends on the source.

Yeah, that's true. But generally a lot of the carbon sources like newspaper and corn cobs and stuff like that, it's just a much slower process.

Right right, So like they have much tougher structural support in their cells.

They have structural integrity exactly. They need to have a good saying that rhymes like if it's yellow, let it meto. If it's brown, flush it down. Sure, I thought you were heading toward that. I was just kind of like on the edge of my seat. No, like, if it's.

Green, I've walked right past.

That's brown. Maybe there is one that we don't know, or maybe someone can write one, like a creative listener.

I would love to hear it. I'll bet we get a bunch of those.

All right, oxygen if you're talking, if we're talking ratios and again, you can walk out as much as possible. But the good news is about your compost piles. It's not like it needs to be like the oxygen that you need no walking around to breathe.

Which is I think twenty one percent in the atmosphere.

Yeah, that's what we have going on. It can get by these aerobic microbes as low as five percent.

Yeah, that's cutting it close.

It's cutting it close. They say, try to hover somewhere around ten or up right. And how do you measure that?

You don't? You just aerrate your pile and it's fine.

By either turning it or you can do hold PVC. And I guess it brings us kind into the management part. Sure, you don't just sit there unless you want to have a totally passive pile. And who wants that? You have to manage this thing, either every day or every other day. Turn it, like we were saying, sure, either with the little crank if you've got a handy little barrel unit, or with a pitchfork or they call it a composting fork in here.

That's pretty fancy.

Probably the same thing in there.

It's the same thing as a pitchfork, except like fifty dollars more.

You want to water it some, but again, do you want to give watering advice?

You don't want it for me. You don't want it to be soaking wet. No, you wanted to be moist. Yeah, damp.

People hate that word, so we'll say damp. And again I mentioned the perforate of PVC pipes that can help it. Says you can avoid turning it by having those pipes.

I would still turn it.

I would too, just to mix it up right.

Yeah, but putting PVC pipes throughout your pile would make it really difficult to turn.

So well, you can pull them out, I guess you could, you know.

But getting them back in is a real pain.

You can stick them back in.

Another way to get to introduce oxygen is earthworms.

Oh man, this is where I go crazy. Oh yeah, we have a lot of worms on our property, just because there's a lot of worms in Georgia. Yeah.

We did a great episode on earthworms, remember.

Yeah, And every time I find them, I pick them up, I show them to Emily and she immediately says, throw it in the garden. You know. And that's because we weren't composting heavily. Now it's going to be throwing in the compost pile.

Sure.

But these guys are great because they naturally I mean, they do a lot of things, but one of the things they do is naturally airrate by just tunneling through that stuff.

Yeah. So earthworms and then worms in general are probably the most important non microscopic resident in your compost pile. Yeah, because they do so much. So worms and especially earthworms and most types of nematodes, they actually go in and like eat a lot of the stuff that's in the compost pile, a lot of the food waste, right or organic waste, and in doing so they break it down, and as they break it down, they make it easier for the microbes to digest themselves. Should we start with

That's right.

So as they're doing this, they're actually breaking the stuff down from what you'd recognize as a banana peel closer and closer to that finished humor miss project product. Yes, so you got bacteria and they're a big part of it. And depending on the phase that the compost pile is in, uh, the there will be different kinds of bacteria in your compost pile.

Yeah, and it's not you know, just bacteria. There's a fung guy doing lots of work. We mentioned nebatodes. You're gonna eventually get mites in there, and slugs. You've already thrown your worms in. Some millipedes doing some action, right with all those cute little legs. And overall these are known as primary consumers.

Some are are are all of them primary consumers?

Well they're listed, okay by this person who made this fancy chart.

So then above that, chuck, you've got the secondary consumers. Secondo, and those are right, those are the those are the predators of the primary consumers, right, yeah, and then you have tertiary consumers. They're the predators of the secondary consumers. And so you put all this together and what you

And eventually a great white shark comes along.

What gets me, eats the whole pile thanks to a shark nade. What gets me thought, the best part of all this to me is that if you look at the lifespan of a compost pile from brand new.

To finished humans, from to.

Humus, Yes, it's it forms a bell as far as the temperature gradient.

Goes, right, Yeah, it's really kind of cool.

So the first stage is the mesophilic stage. Yeah, temperatures get up to I think forty degrees celsius. I can't remember what that is in fahrenheight.

Yeah we'll go with celsius though.

Okay, so it's warmish. And then as the cellular respiration mounts and builds, more more bacteria born and start eating and carry this cellular respiration out. The byproducts are CO two and heat, and heat starts to accumulate in the compost pile so much so that it gets up to something like fifty to sixty degrees celsius, which is like one hundred to one hundred and fifty degrees farrenheights.

Yeah, and it's hot. At this point, your organisms are going to change. You're going to have thermophilic. These are a little heat loving critters and they move in because it's nice and warm. They're snowbirds, they're desert dwellers, and they like it when it's warm. But here's the thing is you want to like you want you don't want it to get too hot, so you want to continue to aerate and keep that temperature in check. What you want is that natural bell to happen on its own right.

So the mesophilic bacteria die off or they go kind of dormant as it enters the thermophilic face, and then after the thermophilic phase ends. The reason it ends is because they've eaten up all of the stuff that's there to eat, and only the hard stuff's left over. And so the thermophiles go away, and some of the meso files come back and new stuff comes in, like ecxinemi seats ectinemi seats, which are kind of like a weird fungi, bacteria cross and they break down like the really hard

Yeah, and you know I mentioned sun earlier can dry it out, but if it gets over sixty five celsius, it's gonna kill off so many microbes. It's gonna really slow down your process. Right, So that's another reason you turn it is to kind of keep and again don't have it direct sunlight, but it's going to keep that temperature where it does its thing naturally, right where you don't want to, you know, put a heat lamp on it. I just want to keep it moist, turn it over

Man? I just love this is why I love Earth's science.

Yeah, it's really amazing because it's like it requires a little bit of human management, but then you kind of just step away and say, do your thing. Yeah, it's really neat.

When is it over? Well, you can tell. There's a few ways of being able to tell. The temperature starts to go down. If it's below one hundred degrees fahaheight, it's out of the thermophilic phase, yes, and it's now into the mesophilic phase. This says that it's probably done. I disagree. I think you probably want it even cooler than that, because the longer you let it cure, the more diverse the microbes inside are going to be the better. The soil that you use to amend it with is

One of it is just eyeball it. And if it's if it's about fifty percent decomposed, like if you still see clearly a banana peel, then it's not done right. You don't want to recognize this stuff as food at this point, or an egg or whatever. And is it is it smaller? Is if it's been reduced by fifty to seventy five percent and it's dark brown or black and crumbly and it looks kind of like soil, then you're you're cooking with gas. As my dad used to say.

The texture, did you say smooth or crumbly?

Yeah?

What about the smell, Well, it shouldn't.

It shouldn't stink bad at this point.

No, it should smell earthy. And actually one of my favorites the actinum my sights. Yeah, the actin of my seats. Okay, they are the reason that soil and dirt has its smell. It's those guys, Yeah, they give it its earthy smell. Isn't that cool?

Yeah? And I think we didn't mention you know that it's doing well along the way if it stops smelling like it doesn't just stink the whole time.

Right, And it's not gonna smell earthy. The soil that you add will smell earthy. But when you grab a handful of humus, it should just fall through your fingers. It should be the closer to black, the better. Yeah, and it should smell like every everything associated with earth should smell like. It's like the word earth. That's what it should smell like. Like, you'll understand what earth smells like.

Yeah, they said peat moss. If you if none of this makes sense.

Go to your local hardware store or lawn and garden center and smell the peat moss exactly.

So, now that it's done, Yeah, you've got your wonderfully natural fertilizer. Use it. Put it, Spread it out in your garden, Spread it out around your trees, throw it in your yard.

Spread it around your naked body, and run around your yard if you want to. It's got a doobie pile, will make it do or quack grass.

Yeah, stay away from that stuff. It's basically like the easiest way to put it without getting too scientific, is it's going to make everything better. Right, It's going to increase soil microbes, it's going to increase nutrients and enhance them. It's going to improve the pH and chemistry of your soil.

Your yard. It's going to structure and again, like what you've just done is taken stuff and had it broken down into its components, unlocked it for your plants to use. So your plants are going to say thank you brother.

Pretty amazing.

Yep.

Uh. Some people create a lot of it and sell it, but you know, mainly people do this to just use around their house.

Yeah, and increasingly towns are starting to do curbside composting. Pickup food waste, pickup neat where you got trash, recycling bin food waste, banana PILs, banana piels.

Right, that's it, all right, go forth and composts.

Yeah, if you want to know more about composting, you can type that word in the search bar at housetif works dot com. Cornell actually also has a really great site about composting if you want to know more about the science of it.

You were very excited about.

I love that site. And since I said Cornell, it's time for the listener mail.

I'm gonna call this wild life specialists. We had a couple of these that wrote in.

Remember we talked about this in the Pain Scale EPs.

And we kind of surmise what it was, and we turns out we were right. And by the way, we heard from paramedics doctors quite a few people about the worst pain.

Yeah, you don't want a long bone fracture.

Yeah, almost one hundred percent of them said of broken femur is like the worst pain you can experience.

And should we say why?

Yeah, go ahead, So several reasons, Right.

We are right because apparently it's a very sensitive area, but also because without that structure, your muscles start spasming, right, which just rocks the whole thing back and forth even more.

And then then like fragmented bone hitting nerve and all kinds of badness.

Yeah, who, So steer clear of that.

All right? So we heard from from two. I'm going to read the one, but I'm going to shout them both out. Hey, guys, very excited to hear you mentioned childlife specialists during your recent episode on Pain Scales. As a child life specialist myself, I thought would take the opportunity to tell you a little bit about our profession, you are right, Chuck, a child life specialist is we help kids deal with being hospitalized. That's really the essence

Seriously, I can't think of too many jobs that are more rewarding than that.

Seriously. We also provide support for siblings and provide legacy building and memory making and end of life situations. Our profession is very rewarding. Josh, you are right. She predicted that you would say that, and I love going to work every day. To become a CLS, you must have a bachelor's or master's child development or a related field, complete a six hundred and forty hour childlife internship, and pass the National Certification Exam. You can visit www dot

Yeah, thanks to you both for that, and thanks for everybody who has anything to do with making kids who are hospitalized feel better. Hats off to you. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at SYSK podcast or Josham Clark. You can hang out with us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know or slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web, stuff you Should Know dot com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks dot com.