Composting questions, answered in the first sentence.
No preamble, no 2,000-word windup. Just whether you can compost it, why your pile smells, and what to do next. With the actual science underneath if you want it.
Compost fails slowly, and that is the whole problem
You will not find out you got it wrong today. You will find out in eight months, when you open the bin expecting dark crumbly soil and get a cold slimy mat of last autumn’s leaves instead.
That delay is why composting advice online is such a mess. Nobody can check their work quickly, so wrong answers survive for years and get copied between sites. Ask whether you can compost citrus and you will get four confident, contradictory answers before lunch.
How this site works
- The answer comes first. If you have to scroll to find out whether the eggshells go in, we have failed, no matter how good paragraph nine is.
- We say when we are not sure. Some of this genuinely is contested. You will see that said out loud rather than smoothed over.
- Nothing gets recommended that has not been used. Our buying guides cover fewer products than the big affiliate sites, on purpose.
- It has to work on a balcony. Advice that assumes half an acre is advice for someone else.
Where do you want to start?
Learn Composting
Start here. What compost is, how it actually works, and the handful of things that matter.
Types of Composting
Hot, cold, tumbler, worm bin, bokashi, trench. Which one fits your space and your patience.
What Can You Compost?
The material library. Straight yes-or-no answers, with the reasoning underneath.
Compost Problems
It smells. There are flies. Nothing is happening. Find the symptom, get the fix.
Seasonal Composting
Frozen piles, autumn leaf gluts, spring restarts. Written for cold climates first.
Using Your Compost
You made the stuff. Here is how much to use, where, and when.
Reviews & Buying Guides
What we actually use, what we would not buy again, and why.
Composting by Climate
Cold North, humid South, arid Southwest, rainy Northwest. Find the version that fits where you live.
Born in Vermont, written for the whole country
Every composting site can show you a photo of perfect finished compost. Almost none of them show you what a pile looks like when it is going wrong: the white mycelium, the grey anaerobic sludge, the cloud of fruit flies that appears the moment you lift the lid.
That is what most people actually need to see, because the question is almost never “what should this look like?” It is “is mine normal?” So we are photographing the failures as carefully as the successes.
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Fourteen pages covering everything you need to start a pile and nothing you don’t: browns and greens, the moisture test, a quick-reference table of what can go in, symptom-by-symptom troubleshooting, and a section for your own climate. Enter your email and the guide downloads straight away.