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Spent 5 hours trying to figure out why my compost bin was cold, and it was one dumb thing
I set up a two bin compost system in my backyard in Sacramento back in March and it has been running cold for weeks, like barely 80 degrees in the middle when it should be cooking. I checked the moisture three separate times, turned it every other day for a while, added a bucket of coffee grounds from the shop down the street, and still nothing. I kept adding more greens thinking I needed more nitrogen, which just made it smell and drew flies. Turns out I had the ratio so far off in the other direction that the pile was basically a wet green brick with no air, and it was way too small to hold heat anyway. Once I mixed in a big bag of shredded cardboard from the recycling and got the pile up to about 3 feet wide, it hit 140 within a couple days. Five hours of googling and turning and worrying over something that one afternoon of restructuring fixed. Has anyone else had a bin that just sat cold no matter what you threw at it?
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