Derrick, you've got a lot of things here and I don't think you're making a cake.

>>Sure I'm not.

So what we have here are the building blocks of making compost.

We have our brown material and our green material.

And what we wanna do is mix these together to create a system that breaks down and that creates microbiology.

And the way that we do that is by mixing these two togethers at ratios.

You wanna do a two to one ratio of brown to green material.

>>Are you talking volume or?

>>Yes, I'm talking by volume.

Not by weight, but by volume.

So a lot of folks like to use buckets.

A popular thing is five-gallon buckets, and you would take two five-gallon buckets of the brown material to one five-gallon bucket of the green material and mix those and that's how you'll get your ratio.

>>To start it off, you know, what size bin would be best?

>>The best size bin is one you can handle.

So the best size bin to get compost started would be about a three foot bin by three foot wide.

And that will give you enough room and area to start the composting process.

>>Okay.

And to get it all going.

So what would be your first layer?

Do you put the green in first?

Do you put the brown in first?

>>What we would do is put the brown in first.

>>The carbon, yeah.

>>So the carbon, which is the brown.

And what I like to do is take the bigger wooden materials and if you can break them down into smaller pieces and start layering the woody material.

>>As best you can.

>>As best you can.

>>Why do you put the wood on the bottom?

>>I like to put the wood on the bottom, so your compost bin will get wet, and this will help soak up any of that leachate which is just leaking.

>>Kind of permeating down through the pile.

>>Yes, exactly.

All the liquid that permeates down and can actually have toxins in or pathogens and you might not want that.

So this will help soak that up, keep it in there, and help it break down.

>>Okay.

So a sponge.

>>Exactly.

It's a sponge.

So with my one part or my two parts of green or brown material, I take one part green material.

>>And you can use weeds.

You can use things from your garden.

You can use- >>Absolutely.

>>Plants that you cut back.

I even use house plants.

>>House plants, the lawn clippings.

>>Even flowers my husband gives me goes in there after they die.

>>Absolutely.

>>So I mean anything that's green and growing can go into that pile.

>>That's correct, anything green, growing, and lush along with any food scraps.

>>Vegetable food scraps.

>>Correct.

Without oil or any of the additives, but just pure vegetable food scraps works great.

>>And then what about the big brown, you know, our carbon over there?

Some of those are pretty big size.

>>Yeah, they are.

So like our leaves here, what we'd wanna do with our leaves is break these down and you'd wanna shred them up to create surface area.

The more surface area you have, the better.

So we would shred these up and then add those in.

Same thing with this brown grass material.

You wanna get it as small as possible.

Add it in.

>>You don't want that to mat.

Grass mats.

>>Correct, correct.

>>Yeah.

I ended up with a layer in my pile of grass.

>>No, you wanna get it kind of spread out.

And then you can add food scraps again, 'cause we have our two parts brown material.

>>Time to add in some green.

>>One part green material.

>>Yeah.

Or nitrogen.

>>Nitrogen.

Yes, correct.

>>Well, this is gonna be easy.

Do we leave it layered like good old lasagna or not?

>>You can leave it layered like good old lasagna, but ultimately you wanna have it mixed in together.

Layering it like lasagna will create a cold compost, and that's less labor intensive.

That's something you just let sit and break down over time.

>>Does it get as hot?

'Cause I know heat is going to be generated by these bacteria.

>>It will get hot, but it won't get as hot as actively moved compost.

>>Okay.

One that's aerobic rather than anaerobic.

>>One that's aerobic.

Exactly.

So you can get a anaerobic compost, which can lead to pathogens and disease if it isn't turned properly and if it isn't layered correctly as well.

>>Or in my case, it's too wet 'cause of all the rain.

>>Correct.

Too much rain will make things go anaerobic.

And compost has a optimal holding capacity where when you take finished compost.

>>Look at that beautiful liquid gold I call that.

>>You shouldn't be able to squeeze any water out, but it should be able to form a clump like this.

>>Here we go.

Put it over here to show the clump.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's beautiful.

That's absolutely beautiful.

Do you sort of inoculate a fresh compost pile with soil and maybe compost that's in your garden?

>>Yeah, so one thing you can do is if you have mostly complete compost, you can take this and put it through almost like a strainer, a quarter inch strainer or so, or hardware fabric or chicken wire.

And you can take the bigger chunks of wood out like this.

This can go back into your compost pile and continue to break down.

>>Recycle it.

(laughs) >>Exactly.

Exactly.

>>Well, this has been fun, but my question is, we've got these layers, we need to turn it.

What's the best system?

We have one minute to talk about turning it and temperature, so.

>>Well, the best way to turn it ultimately is with a pitchfork or a shovel, or if you're strong enough to just lift a tarp and pull a tarp over and mix the stuff from the top and outside into the middle.

So anything that's on the top or outside, we wanna take that and put that on the bottom and the middle.

And the stuff that's on the bottom and the middle, bring that to the outside so we can keep composting.

>>Sounds great.

I do have another trick though, 'cause I love this compost corkscrew, and this here makes that a lot easier, okay?

And I find it very helpful because the pitchfork method and me, I just go, hmm, with all that chicken wire, it's always getting stuck and I get a little frustrated.

Because turning it is important because that's how we get our temperature up.

We get air into it, which gets things cooking.

So what temperature, you know, do we want our compost to be and why?

>>Well, we want our compost to be a minimum of 90 degrees and a very maximum of 170 degrees.

Anything above 170 degrees will start to kill off the good bacteria.

>>Oh, we don't want that.

But what will kill off weed seeds that we have here?

>>Weed seeds, as long as it gets to 90 degrees, that will kill off the weed seeds.

>>Wonderful.

Derrick, that's great news.

And I thank you so much.

You've made composting sound so easy and it is, so I encourage everyone to compost.