Chapter 14: Workin' the Dirt

In This Chapter

Clearing your garden plot

Adding the right nutrients and other stuff to your soil

Mixing your amendments into the soil

Forming a compost pile

Properly preparing the soil before planting is an all-important first step toward a bountiful harvest. Don't take shortcuts with your soil. You'll be cheating your plants at their roots, and they won't like it.

In this chapter, I tell you how to take care of your soil — clean it up, straighten it out, and make it an all-around better place for roots. Remember, good soil makes happy roots, and happy roots mean a healthy garden.

Razing Your Garden Spot

After you choose a good sunny spot for your vegetable garden and draw a plan on paper (see Chapter 3 if you haven't done this preparatory work), you need to clean up the area so the soil will be easier to work. You can clear your garden area any time during the year, but the season before planting works best — clear in the fall for spring planting, clear in the spring for summer or fall planting. You can clear the area the day before you plant, but you may have more weed problems later.

If you already have an established garden, clean up any debris in fall or winter, depending on where you live, and till the ground before planting.

Here are the basics of initially clearing your garden spot, which I explain in more detail in the sections that follow:

1. Outline the areas of your garden plot that you want to clear.

You outline the areas depending on how you want the plots to be shaped. Follow these guidelines:

• To get your edges straight for a square or rectangular vegetable plot, stretch a string between sticks and mark the line with a trickle of ground white limestone, which is available at garden centers.

• For a round garden, use a hose or rope to lay out the area, adjusting the position to create a smooth curve.

• If you want several individual beds separated by permanent paths, outline each bed independently with string, sticks, and limestone so you don't waste time improving soil that you'll never use. But if you think that you may change your garden layout from season to season or year to year, work the entire area within the outline.

2. Clear the surface by first removing plants, weeds, brush, and rock. If necessary, mow the site to cut back the grass and weeds close to the surface of the soil.

See the section "Killing weeds and aggressive grasses," for details on removing weeds.

3. Dig out the roots of small trees and tough weeds with a hoe, shovel, or pick ax.

4. After the vegetation is manageable, remove any sod.

See the section "Stripping sod" for details on how to do this.

Killing weeds and aggressive grasses

If your garden area contains a lot of perennial weeds — weeds, like quack grass, that come back year after year — or if you need to clear an area of a warm-season lawn composed of vigorous grasses (like Bermuda grass), make sure that you first kill these weeds or grasses. You can pull out or mulch out seedlings (see Chapter 15 for more on mulches and weeding), but many aggressive weeds and turf spread by underground roots as well as seeds; these underground roots can haunt you for eons.

If you have an existing garden, you have to be diligent about weeding, or you may need to start all over again with tilling and removing as much of the weed's root system as you can.

You can kill weeds and aggressive grasses two ways:

Hand dig and sift: For a small garden dig up the earth and carefully sift the soil, removing sod and root parts that may come back next year as weeds (see the tip on sifting compost at the end of this chapter).

Apply a covering: An easy, chemical-free way to clear your garden is to cover it with clear or black plastic, cardboard, or even old rugs. After a month under these impermeable coverings, existing plants die from the lack of sunlight. You must plan ahead to use this method, and it may not look pretty, but it works like a charm — especially on annual weeds. For perennial weeds, you may need to dig out their roots, too, after applying the plastic.

You can buy plastic in rolls at hardware stores or home improvement centers; check department stores for old pieces of cardboard and carpet stores for old rugs. Use the thickest plastic or cardboard you can find — it should be at least 2 millimeters, but 4 millimeters is even better.

Controlling weeds and grasses by applying a covering to your garden area is easy. Just follow these steps:

1. Spread the covering over your entire garden area, securing the edges with spare rocks, bricks, or boards.

Let neighboring pieces overlap by several inches so no light can penetrate. If you're using old rugs, place them nap side down.

2. After a month, remove the covering and strip off any grass or weeds.

Use a shovel to cut off any grass or weeds at the root level (just below the soil surface). If they aren't too thick, rototill them into the ground.

3. Wet the area and wait about 10 days for weeds to sprout.

Leave the covering off; you want weeds to sprout. You should get some growth because you haven't removed weed seeds.

4. Use a hoe to kill the weeds.

Hoeing the weeds down is sufficient to kill annual weeds, but if you have perennial weeds, you need to dig out the roots. Check out the National Gardening Association's Weed Library (www.garden.org/weedlibrary) for help identifying the weeds in your garden.

For an organic approach to killing weeds and building your garden soil, try a no-till layered garden technique (see Figure 14-1). It's like making lasagna. The season before planting, lay down a 3- to 4-sheet-thick layer of black and white newspaper over the garden area. Water the paper to keep it in place. Cover the newspaper with a 6-inch-thick layer of hay or straw. Top that with a 1- to 2-inch-thick layer of compost. By the next planting season, the layers will have killed the grass and most of the annual and perennial weeds in your garden. You can hand pull any tenacious perennial weeds that survived. Earthworms will have munched up much of the newspaper turning it into valuable compost. You can plant your seedlings right into the mulched layers, and they'll grow like weeds (even better).

Stripping sod

If you don't want to try the techniques in the preceding section, you can immediately remove the lawn grass by stripping the sod (grass and roots) before planting. I show you how to clear it away in this section. If your lawn consists of bluegrass and other less-spreading grasses, you can strip the sod without first killing the grass; most lawns in the northern United States consist of these types of grasses. But you should kill weedier grasses, like Bermuda grass, before you strip the sod (see the preceding section for details on killing weedier grass). Stripping sod takes a lot of effort, but it works. Just follow these steps, and have your wheelbarrow or garden cart handy:

1. Water the area that you want to clear for 15 minutes for each of the 2 days prior to digging up your sod.

I suggest watering this way because stripping sod is easier when the ground is slightly moist.

2. Starting at one end of your plot, slip a spade under the grass and slide it under the sod.

An easier method is to precut the sod into square or rectangular sections and then loosen each section with a spade. Either way, don't dig too deep; you just want to remove the sod and 1 to 2 inches of roots. You also can use a rented sod stripper to cut the sod into rows that you roll up and remove.

3. Pivot your spade up and let the sod flip off the spade and back onto the ground. Use your spade to slice off the sod section, toss the sod into a wheelbarrow or garden cart, and take it to a compost pile.

If your sod has healthy grass with few weeds, and you don't want to compost it, use it to patch bare spots in your lawn. Keep it well watered, and it should root and blend in with the existing grasses.

4. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 until your garden is cleared of sod.

These steps should clear all the grass in your garden. You'll get new growth only if you have an aggressive grass like Bermuda and don't kill all the roots.

Analyzing and Improving Your Soil

After clearing your garden area, you need to take a close look at your soil — give it a good squeeze, have it tested, amend it, and then work it out to make sure it's in shipshape. Good soil gives vegetable roots a balance of all the things they need: moisture, nutrients, and air. And knowing your soil type enables you to counteract problems that you may face when gardening on that piece of land. I explain the basics in the following sections.

Distinguishing different types of soil

Three main types of soil exist, with a lot of variations in between. Hard clay is at one end of the spectrum; soft, sandy soil is at the other end; and loam is in the middle. Being familiar with your soil helps you know what to expect when gardening. Clay soil tends to have a lot of natural fertility but is heavy to work with and doesn't drain water well. Sandy soil, on the other hand, drains water well (maybe too well) but doesn't have a lot of natural fertility. Loam, the ideal soil, is somewhere in between the two.

Here are general characteristics of the three basic types of soil:

Sandy soil is composed of mostly large mineral particles. Water moves through this soil quickly, taking nutrients with it. Sandy soil is well aerated, quick to dry out and warm up, and often lacks the nutrients that vegetables need.

Clay soil consists of mainly small particles that cling tightly together and hold water and nutrients. It's slow to dry out and warm up, and has poor aeration, but it's fertile when it can be worked.

Loam soil is a happy mixture of large and small particles. It's well aerated and drains properly, but it can still hold water and nutrients. This is the soil to have for a great vegetable garden.

To find out what type of soil you have, grab a handful of moist soil and squeeze it, as shown in Figure 14-2. Then use these guidelines to determine what type of soil you're working with:

Sandy soil falls apart and doesn't hold together in a ball when you let go. It feels gritty when you rub it between your fingers.

Clay soil oozes through your fingers as you squeeze it and stays in a slippery wad when you let go. Rubbing clay soil between your fingers feels slippery.

Loam soil usually stays together after you squeeze it, but it falls apart easily when you poke it with your finger.

If you have sandy or clay soil, don't despair; you can improve your soil and make it more like loam. Check out the section "Adding organic matter (aka the dead stuff)," later in this chapter, for details.

Testing your soil

Vegetables are kind of picky about soil chemistry. Too much of this nutrient or too little of that nutrient, and you have problems. If you don't believe me, check out Chapter 4 to see what happens when tomatoes grow in soil that's deficient in calcium; they develop blossom-end rot. Yuck. Sometimes too much of a nutrient, such as nitrogen, causes lots of leaf growth on plants (such as peppers) but few fruits. Getting the levels just right is important for the best harvest.

In addition to nutrient levels, soil pH also is an important factor in plant growth. The right pH enables vegetables to use nutrients from the soil. Soil is rated on a pH scale, with a pH of 1 being most acidic and a pH of 14 being most alkaline. If your soil's pH isn't within a suitable range, plants can't take up nutrients — like phosphorus and potassium — even if they're present in the soil in high amounts. On the other hand, if the pH is too low, the solubility of certain minerals, such as manganese, may increase to toxic levels.

Most vegetables grow well in a slightly acidic soil with a pH between 6 and 7. Potatoes, including sweet potatoes, prefer a slightly more acidic soil, in the 5 to 6 range. But in general, if you aim for a soil pH between 6 and 7, your vegetables should grow well.

The only way to find out whether your soil will be to your vegetables' liking is to test it. Don't worry; analyzing your soil isn't complicated, and you don't need a lab coat. Here are two ways that you can test your soil:

Use a do-it-yourself kit. This basic pH test measures your soil's acidity and alkalinity and sometimes major nutrient content. Buy a kit at a nursery, follow the instructions, and voilà — you know your soil's pH. However, the test gives you only a rough picture of the pH and nutrient levels in your soil. You may want to know more about your soil.

Have a soil lab do a test for you. A complete soil test is a good investment because a soil lab can thoroughly analyze your soil. Here's what you can find out from a soil lab's test in addition to the pH level:

• Your soil's nutrient content. If you know your soil's nutrient content, you can determine how much and what kind of fertilizer to use. In fact, many soil tests tell you exactly how much fertilizer to add; see Chapter 15 for more on fertilizer.

• Soil problems that are specific to your geographic region. A soil test may help you identify local problems. The soil lab should then give you a recommendation for a type and amount of fertilizer to add to your soil. For example, in dry-summer areas, you may have salty soil; the remedy is to add gypsum, a readily available mineral soil additive.

Of course, soil labs charge around $20 to $30 for their basic services. Your local Cooperative Extension Service office or a private soil lab can conduct a complete and reliable soil test. To locate a private lab, look in the phone book under soil testing (or search the Internet for soil test labs around the country). You also can ask your Cooperative Extension Service office for recommendations.

Fall is a good time to test soil because labs aren't as busy. It's also a good time to add many amendments (materials that improve your soil's fertility and workability) to your soil because they break down slowly.

To prepare a soil sample to use with a do-it-yourself kit or to send to a soil lab, follow these steps:

1. Fill a cup with soil from the top 4 to 6 inches of soil from your vegetable garden, and then place the soil in a plastic bag.

2. Dig six to eight similar samples from different parts of your plot.

3. Mix all the cups of soil together; place two cups of the combined soil in a plastic bag — that's your soil sample.

After you've collected your sample, consult the instructions from your soil test kit or the testing lab.

If you're testing a soil imbalance — a known problem that you've identified in either pH or nutrients — you may want to test your soil every year because changes in pH and most nutrients are gradual. A home testing kit is a good way to test a pH imbalance. For nutrients, you may want to do a yearly test at a lab until the imbalance (high or low levels of a nutrient) is fixed. To maintain balanced soil, test it every 3 to 5 years.

Adjusting soil pH

Most garden soils have a pH between 5.5 and 8.0. This number helps you determine when and how to adjust your soil's pH level. The following guidelines help you interpret this number:

If the number is below 6, the soil is too acidic, and you need to add ground limestone.

If the measurement is above 7.5, the soil is too alkaline for most vegetables, and you need to add soil sulfur.

In the following sections, I explain how to figure out how much lime or sulfur you need to add to your soil and how to apply the materials.

Calculating how much lime or sulfur you need

All Cooperative Extension Service offices, any soil lab, and many lawn and garden centers have charts showing how much lime or sulfur to add to correct a pH imbalance. The charts tell you how many pounds of material to add per 1,000 square feet, so you need to measure the size of your vegetable garden first. Then use Tables 14-1 and 14-2 to figure out how much lime or sulfur you need to add to your soil.

In general, soils in climates with high rainfall — such as east of the Mississippi River (particularly east of the Appalachian Mountains) or in the Pacific Northwest — tend to be acidic. West of the Mississippi, where less rainfall occurs, soils are more alkaline. But regardless of where you live in the United States, you should easily be able to find the lime or sulfur that you need at your local garden center.

Applying lime or sulfur to your soil

The best way to apply sulfur and limestone to your soil is to use a drop spreader (the same machine you may use to apply lawn fertilizer). This simple machine doesn't cost very much, and it helps you spread the material more evenly. Some nurseries may even loan you a spreader or allow you to rent one inexpensively. You also can spread these materials by hand if you're careful and wear gloves. No matter how you spread the materials, make sure that you work the soil well afterward.

You can purchase and apply different types of limestone to your soil. The type you use may depend on the type of nutrients your soil needs:

Dolomitic limestone contains magnesium as well as calcium. Magnesium is one of the nutrients that a soil lab may test for, and even though it isn't in the top three (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium), it's as important as calcium for plant growth. Use dolomitic limestone to adjust the pH if your soil test shows that your soil is low in magnesium.

Pulverized limestone is the most common and inexpensive acid neutralizer. Use this limestone if you don't need to add magnesium to your soil.

Pelletized pulverized limestone is a little more expensive than ordinary pulverized limestone, but it's cleaner, less dusty, and easier to use than both dolomitic and powdered limestone.

Sulfur usually only comes in powdered form or mixed with other nutrients such as ammonium sulfate.

Your soil uses limestone and sulfur most efficiently when it's tilled into the soil to a depth of 4 to 6 inches.

Adding organic matter (aka the dead stuff)

If you're like most people, your garden doesn't have perfect loam soil. So to fix that mucky clay or loose sand, you need to add organic matter — once-living stuff like compost, sawdust, animal manure, ground bark, grass clippings, and leaf mold (composted tree leaves). You can't change the type of soil (clay, sand, or loam) you have, but adding organic matter makes your soil more like loam, which is perfect for vegetable roots. Even if you have loam soil, you still should add organic matter to your soil every year.

Organic matter improves garden soil in the following ways:

It helps loosen and aerate clay soil.

It improves the water- and nutrient-holding capacity of sandy soil.

It provides the once-living material that attracts microorganisms, beneficial fungi, worms, and other soil-borne critters that improve the health of your vegetables.

Work some organic matter into your soil before you plant each season. If you're using unfinished (raw) organic matter like leaves or undecomposed manure, add it to your soil at least 1 month before planting. That way it will break down before you plant. Add finished compost and manures just before planting.

Follow these steps to add organic matter to your garden soil (for information on the best kinds of organic matter, see the following sections):

1. Add a 1- to 2-inch layer of organic matter to the area where you intend to plant your vegetables.

Go for the higher end (2 inches) if your garden is new or if your soil is heavy clay or very sandy. Use less if you've grown there for years or if your soil is loamy and fertile.

You need 3 cubic yards of compost to spread a 1-inch-thick layer over 1,000 square feet.

2. Work in the organic matter to a depth of at least 6 inches.

There's nothing glamorous about spreading manure. The best way to spread organic matter is with a wheelbarrow and a shovel. Work it into the soil with a shovel, iron fork, or rototiller.

Another way to add organic matter to your soil is to grow your own. You can find out more about growing green manure and cover crops in Chapter 16.

The best choice: Compost

The best organic material to add to your soil is compost. Composting breaks down yard waste, agricultural waste, wood scraps, and even sludge into a crumbly soil-like material called humus.

Compost is usually clean, easy to use, and available. You can buy it in bags or have it delivered by the truckload. Most waste disposal sites make compost and sell it relatively cheap. You also can make your own compost; see the later section "Making Your Own Compost" for details.

Before you buy compost, ask whether the compost contains any heavy metals, such as lead, and whether the compost is safe to use in a vegetable garden. Your local health department should be able to tell you what levels of lead and heavy metals are unsafe. The folks at the waste disposal site also may even be able to give you a precise nutrient content if they've performed any tests on the compost.

Other organic materials, such as sawdust and manure

Using organic materials other than compost — such as sawdust and manure — is fine, but these materials present a few problems that compost doesn't. Here are some advantages and disadvantages:

Sawdust adds organic matter to your soil, which eventually breaks down and forms humus. However, the sawdust also robs the soil of nitrogen when it decomposes, so you have to add more fertilizer to compensate (see Chapter 15).

Livestock manure improves your soil's nitrogen level (see Chapter 15 for more information on manure). However, livestock diets often include lots of hay that's full of weed seeds, which may germinate in your vegetable garden. Some manures (such as horse manure) add organic matter and some nutrients to your soil, but they're also loaded with bedding materials (like dried hay) that cause the same problem that adding sawdust causes.

If you use manure, make sure it's fully composted — that is, it has been sitting around for a year or two, so it's decomposed, and the salts have been leached out. Too much salt in the soil can be harmful to plants. Good quality compost or fully decomposed manure should have a dark brown color, earthy smell, and have little original material visible.

Turning Your Soil

After adding nutrients and amendments to your soil, you need to mix them up. Turning your soil to mix the amendments enables them to break down faster and be available where the roots can use them.

If your soil is dry, water well, and let it sit for a few days before digging. Then, to determine whether your soil is ready to turn, take a handful of soil and squeeze it. The soil should crumble easily in your hand with a flick of your finger; if water drips out, it's too wet.

Don't work soil that's too wet. Working soil that's too wet ruins the soil structure — after it dries, the soil is hard to work and even harder to grow roots in.

The easiest way to turn your soil, especially in large plots, is with a rototiller (or tiller, for short). You can rent or borrow a tiller, or if you're serious about this vegetable-garden business, buy one. I prefer tillers with rear tines and power-driven wheels because you can really lean into the machines and use your weight to till deeper. If you have a small (less than 100 square feet) vegetable plot, consider using a minitiller (see Chapter 20 for more details on this tool) or hand dig it if you're up for a little exercise.

If you use a rototiller, adjust the tines so the initial pass over your soil is fairly shallow (a few inches deep). As the soil loosens, set the tines deeper with successive passes (crisscrossing at 90-degree angles) until the top 8 to 12 inches of soil are loosened.

To turn your soil by hand, use a straight spade and a digging fork. You can either dig your garden to one spade's depth, about 1 foot, or double dig (that is, work your soil to a greater depth), going down 20 to 24 inches. After turning the soil, level the area with a steel rake, breaking up clods and discarding any rocks. Although double digging takes more effort, it enables roots to penetrate deeper to find water and nutrients. If you're double digging, dig the upper part of the soil with a straight spade to remove the sod and loosen the subsoil (usually any soil below 8 to 12 inches) with a spade. Replace the original topsoil often when you loosen the subsoil.

Don't overtill your soil. Tilling to mix amendments or loosen the soil in spring or fall is fine, but using the tiller repeatedly in summer to weed or turn beds ruins the soil structure and causes the organic matter (the good stuff) to break down too fast.

Making Your Own Compost

Making your own compost is a way to turn a wide array of readily available organic materials — such as grass clippings, household garbage, and plant residue — into a uniform, easy-to-handle source of organic matter for your garden. Even though finished compost is usually low in plant nutrients, composting enables you to enrich your soil in an efficient, inexpensive way. You can add organic matter that isn't decomposed to your soil and get a similar result, but most people find that dark, crumbly compost is easier to handle than half-rotten household garbage — yuck.

A compost pile (a pile of organic matter constructed to decompose) can be free standing or enclosed and can be made any time of year. However, you'll have the most organic matter in summer and fall when decomposition occurs faster due to the warm weather.

Wire fencing makes a good container because it lets in plenty of air. You also can purchase easy-to-use composters at garden centers or through mail-order catalogs (see Figure 14-3). Some composters simplify the turning process (see "Moistening and turning your compost pile" later in this chapter), because they rotate on swivels or come apart in sections or pieces. They're easy to use, but usually aren't large enough for the amount of material produced in a large garden. You can build your own composter as well.

In the following sections, I show you how to build, moisten, and turn a compost pile; I also warn you about materials that should never, ever go into a compost pile.

Building a compost pile

Building a good compost pile involves much more than just tossing organic materials in a pile in the corner of your yard, though many people (including me at times) use this technique with varied success. Because, you know, everything does eventually rot. But to compost correctly, you need to have a good size for your pile, add the right types and amount of materials, and provide the correct amount of moisture.

Here are the characteristics of a well-made pile:

It heats up quickly — a sign that the decay organisms are at work.

Decomposition proceeds at a rapid rate.

The pile doesn't give off any bad odors.

The organisms that do all the decay work take up carbon and nitrogen (the stuff they feed on and break down) in proportion to their needs.

You can easily come up with the correct amounts of materials for a compost pile by building the pile in layers. Just follow these steps:

1. Choose a well-drained spot in your yard.

If you build your compost pile on a naturally wet spot, the layers will become too wet and inhibit the decomposition process.

2. Create a 4- to 6-inch layer of "brown" materials that are rich in carbon.

These brown materials include roots and stalks of old plants, old grass clippings, dried hay, leaves, and so on. The more finely chopped these materials are, the more surface area that decay organisms can attack, and the faster the materials decompose.

3. Add a thin layer of "green" materials that are high in nitrogen.

Green materials include green grass clippings, kitchen vegetable scraps, a 2- to 4-inch layer of manure, or a light, even coating of blood meal, cottonseed meal, or organic fertilizer high in nitrogen (see Chapter 15 for more on fertilizers).

4. Repeat these green and brown layers (Steps 2 through 3) until the pile is no more than 5 feet high.

If a pile is higher than 5 feet, too little oxygen reaches the center of the pile, enabling some nasty anaerobic decay organisms to take over and produce bad odors; I hate that. Five feet is a good maximum width for the pile as well.

Here are a few additional ways to ensure success in your compost pile:

Moisten each layer of your compost pile lightly with a watering can as you build it. However, don't let the pile get soggy.

Cover each layer with a few inches of garden soil. The soil covers any material in the nitrogen layer that may attract flies, such as household garbage.

Add a dusting of ground limestone or wood ashes on the carbon layer. This dusting keeps the compost's pH around the 6 to 7 mark that your plants like.

Avoiding materials that don't belong in a compost pile

A well-made pile heats up enough to kill off many insects and disease organisms, but the heating isn't uniform enough to be relied on to kill everything that you want it to. So don't add the following materials to your pile:

Diseased or infected plant material: Disease organisms may survive the composting process and stick around to reinfect your plants when you apply the finished compost.

Weeds that have gone to seed: The heat may not be high enough to kill the weed seeds. And then those weeds will show up in your garden.

Pieces of aggressive weeds like quack grass or Bermuda grass: Even a small piece of a root can produce a new plant.

Grass clippings from lawns treated with herbicides: Some herbicides may not break down during the composting process.

Meat scraps and fats: They break down slowly and may attract animals to the pile.

Dog or cat feces: They may carry diseases that can be transmitted to humans.

Moistening and turning your compost pile

After you build your compost pile, the decay process begins, causing the center of the pile to heat up. Proper moisture helps decay organisms to work properly. Following are some ways to keep your compost pile moist:

Water the pile as needed. To determine whether you need to water, dig about 1 foot into the pile and see if it's moist.

Be careful not to overwater your pile. It's easy to do. The water seeps in and tends not to evaporate readily, so people think the pile is dry when it's not.

If there's a long dry spell or if you live in a dry-summer area, water the entire pile to keep it lightly moist.

Make a depression in the top of the pile to collect rainfall.

You also must turn the pile periodically to aerate it, prevent it from overheating, and ensure that all the material decomposes uniformly. You can turn your compost pile by forking the material from the outside of the pile to the center or by moving the pile from one area to another. If you made a pile out of wire fencing, simply unhook the ends, pull the fencing apart, and move the cylinder a few feet away from the pile. Then fork the materials from the pile into the empty wire cylinder.

How often you turn the pile and how quickly the compost is done depend on how quickly decay takes place. For example, green, succulent organic material — like fresh grass clippings — decays faster than dried plant material; cool fall temperatures or a spell of rainy days that turn the pile soggy slow things down. Follow these guidelines for deciding when to turn your pile:

If you added only shredded material, the pile may be ready for turning in a week.

If the pile contains a lot of big pieces of organic material, wait several weeks before turning.

If the pile heats up and then cools, turn it.

Turning the pile two to three times throughout the process is plenty.

You can tell that decay has set in if your pile starts to smell bad. If smells occur, hold your nose and fix things by spreading out the pile and reconstructing it.

Your compost is ready for use when the interior of the pile is no longer hot and all the material in the pile has broken down into a uniform, dark crumbly substance; this process takes about 1 to 2 months. To determine whether the pile is no longer hot, feel the interior of the pile with your hand. If you're squeamish, use a compost thermometer (which is available at garden centers).