About this site
Vermont Composting exists because composting advice online is unusually bad: confidently written, mutually contradictory, and rarely tested by anyone who has opened the bin eight months later. Below: the practical detail on about Vermont Composting, and what most guides leave out.
What we are trying to do
Answer composting questions in the first sentence, explain the reasoning underneath, and stop. No 2,000-word windup before the answer, no padding for word count.
Who writes this
Vermont Composting is written by Bruce Michaels, who has composted in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom for ten years. That is the coldest corner of one of the coldest composting climates in the country, which turns out to be a useful place to test advice from. A method that survives a Northeast Kingdom winter works more or less anywhere.
He started this site after one too many winters of following guidance written by people who have never watched a pile freeze solid in November and stay that way until April. The house style follows from that: answer first, admit it when the evidence is genuinely mixed, and never recommend equipment nobody here has used.
Our standards are set out in the editorial policy.
Why Vermont
Because cold-climate composting is the hard case. A method that survives a Vermont winter works almost anywhere warmer. The advice here is written for the whole country, tested against the harder end of the conditions.
What you will not find here
Product recommendations for things nobody has used. Fabricated test results. Confident answers where the evidence is genuinely thin, where it is, we say so.
Related
Our standards are set out in the editorial policy. How we handle affiliate links: affiliate disclosure.
Further reading on about Vermont Composting
Independent sources worth reading alongside this page: EPA, Composting at Home · Cornell Waste Management Institute.