The widespread presence of clay and ammonia-fixing bacteria in all soils permits industrial farmers to inject gaseous ammonia directly into the earth where it is promptly and completely altered into nitrates.  A very hot pile leaking ammonia may contain too little soil, but more likely it is also so hot that the nitrifying bacteria have been killed off.  Escaping ammonia is not only an offensive nuisance, valuable fertility is being lost into the atmosphere.

Weather and season. You can adopt a number of strategies to keep weather from chilling a compost pile.  Wind both lowers temperature and dries out a pile, so if at all possible, make compost in a sheltered location.  Heavy, cold rains can chill and waterlog a pile.  Composting under a roof will also keep hot sun from baking moisture out of a pile in summer.  Using bins or other compost structures can hold in heat that might otherwise be lost from the sides of unprotected heaps.

It is much easier to maintain a high core temperature when the weather is warm.  It may not be so easy to make hot compost heaps during a northern winter.  So in some parts of the country I would not expect too much from a compost pile made from autumn cleanup.  This stack of leaves and frost-bitten garden plants may have to await the spring thaw, then to be mixed with potent spring grass clippings and other nitrogenous materials in order to heat up and complete the composting process.  What to do with kitchen garbage during winter in the frozen North makes an interesting problem and leads serious recyclers to take notice of vermicomposting. (See Chapter 6.)

In southern regions the heap may be prevented from overheating by making it smaller or not as tall.  Chapter Nine describes in great detail how Sir Albert Howard handled the problem of high air temperature while making compost in India.

The Fertilizing Value of Compost

It is not possible for me to tell you how well your own homemade compost will fertilize plants.  Like home-brewed beer and home-baked bread you can be certain that your compost may be the equal of or superior to almost any commercially made product and certainly will be better fertilizer than the high carbon result of municipal solid waste composting.  But first, let’s consider two semi-philosophical questions, “good for what?” and “poor as what?”

Any compost is a “social good” if it conserves energy, saves space in landfills and returns some nutrients and organic matter to the soil, whether for lawns, ornamental plantings, or vegetable gardens.  Compared to the fertilizer you would have purchased in its place, any homemade compost will be a financial gain unless you buy expensive motor-powered grinding equipment to produce only small quantities.

Making compost is also a “personal good.”  For a few hours a year, composting gets you outside with a manure fork in your hand, working up a sweat.  You intentionally participate in a natural cycle:  the endless rotation of carbon from air to organic matter in the form of plants, to animals, and finally all of it back into soil.  You can observe the miraculous increase in plant and soil health that happens when you intensify and enrich that cycle of carbon on land under your control.