By October the heap has become about six feet high, sixteen feet long and about seven feet wide at the base.  I’ve made no attempt to water this pile as it was built, so it is quite dry and has hardly decomposed at all.  Soon those winter rains that the Maritime northwest is famous for arrive.  From mid-October through mid-April it drizzles almost every day and rains fairly hard on occasion.  Some 45 inches of water fall.  But the pile is loosely stacked with lots of air spaces within and much of the vegetation started the winter in a dry, mature form with a pretty hard “bark” or skin that resists decomposition.  Winter days average in the high 40s, so little rotting occurs.

Still, by next April most of the pile has become quite wet.  Some garbagey parts of it have decomposed significantly, others not at all; most of it is still quite recognizable but much of the vegetation has a grayish coating of microorganisms or has begun to turn light brown.  Now comes the only two really hard hours of compost-making effort each year.  For a good part of one morning I turn the pile with a manure fork and shovel, constructing a new pile next to the old one.

First I peel off the barely-rotted outer four or five inches from the old pile; this makes the base of the new one.  Untangling the long stringy grasses, seed stalks, and Brussels sprout stems from the rest can make me sweat and even curse, but fortunately I must stop occasionally to spray water where the material remains dry and catch my wind.  Then, I rearrange the rest so half-decomposed brassica stumps and other big chunks are placed in the center where the pile will become the hottest and decomposition will proceed most rapidly.  As I reform the material, here and there I lightly sprinkle a bit of soil shoveled up from around the original pile.  When I’ve finished turning it, the new heap is about five feet high, six feet across at the bottom, and about eight feet long.  The outside is then covered with a thin layer of crumbly, black soil scraped up where the pile had originally stood before I turned it.

Using hand tools for most kinds of garden work, like weeding, cultivating, tilling, and turning compost heaps is not as difficult or nearly as time consuming as most people think if one has the proper, sharp tools.  Unfortunately, the knowledge of how to use hand tools has largely disappeared.  No one has a farm-bred grandfather to show them how easy it is to use a sharp shovel or how impossibly hard it can be to drive a dull one into the soil.  Similarly, weeding with a sharp hoe is effortless and fast.  But most new hoes are sold without even a proper bevel ground into the blade, much less with an edge that has been carefully honed.  So after working with dull shovels and hoes, many home food growers mistakenly conclude that cultivation is not possible without using a rotary tiller for both tillage and weeding between rows.  But instead of an expensive gasoline-powered machine all they really needed was a little knowledge and a two dollar file.