Animal Guides
Chickens, ducks, turkeys, geese, quail, rabbits, goats, sheep, pigs, cattle and bees: getting started, housing, feeding, care and health.
Raising Chickens →How-To Guides
Step-by-step guides for every animal, the garden, orchard, pasture and compost: getting started, housing, feeding, daily care, breeding, health and harvest.
Garden and Land Guides
The vegetable garden, orchard, pasture and compost — with the key numbers and links to the trackers that keep your records.
Growing a Garden →Making Compost
Compost turns manure, bedding, leaves and kitchen scraps into the best garden food there is. A hot pile is fast; a cold pile is easy. Both work.
- Mix
- about 2–3 parts browns to 1 part greens
- Smallest hot pile
- 3 × 3 × 3 ft
- Hot pile
- 130–160°F
- Ready in
- 2–6 months hot, 6–12 months cold
1What goes in
- Greens (nitrogen): manure, grass clippings, kitchen scraps, garden waste.
- Browns (carbon): leaves, straw, wood chips, used animal bedding, cardboard.
- Leave out meat, dairy, grease, dog and cat waste, and diseased plants.
2Building a hot pile
- Build it all at once, at least 3 ft each way, layering greens and browns.
- Keep it as damp as a wrung-out sponge.
- Check the temperature; when it drops below about 110°F, turn the pile.
- Turn 3–5 times; when it doesn’t heat up again and looks like dark soil, let it cure a month.
3Using it
- Spread 1–3 in on beds each year, or use it as mulch.
- Fresh manure should be composted or aged before going on food crops (rabbit manure is the exception).
- Screen finished compost for seed-starting mixes.
Put it to work
These free tools keep the records for you once you’ve made an account:
These are rules of thumb from university extension guidance. Breed, climate and your state’s rules change the details — your county extension office is the best place to ask, and you can find it on the selling rules page by ZIP code.