3 Ways to Use Compost Piles in Winter – GWC Mag

A funny thing about composting is that it is so tied to gardening that many folks tend to forget that it’s a year-round activity. We create organic waste in the winter just as we do in summer, and that means we’ve got to do something with it.

Well, lucky for us, nature doesn’t exactly stop doing its thing because the temperature drops. Sure, trees may be dormant, and lots of plants complete their life cycle, but the processes of nature—roots extending, seeds waiting—keep going.

The same goes for compost. Really cold temperatures might slow things down a bit; however, we can build an effective, active compost pile in the winter, too. All we have to do is tweak the routine a little.

Even better, compost piles in the wintertime have a lot of uses beyond simply making soil. The decomposition process creates heat, too, and that’s quite a useful thing to have in January.

Composting in Winter

The big advantage of summer compost piles is that heat and humidity speed up decomposition, so things tend to happen faster. Nonetheless, there are a few tricks up our sleeve for keeping cold-weather composts warm.

• Insulate your pile: Most folks put compost in a bin of some sort, and the main purpose of that is to keep it contained, stacked, and tidy. To keep it warmer, that same compost bin can be insulated by straw or hay bales, or it can have leaves raked up against its sides with a blanket or tarp over the top. In the summertime, the straw or leaves can be used as mulch.
• Layer green and brown material, use small pieces, and add a lot at once: in reality, this is good compost form period. We need both nitrogen-rich (green) and carbon-rich materials (brown) to get a balanced pile. Smaller pieces break down more quickly, and adding a lot at once means the pile heats up because there is plenty for the microorganisms to feed on.
• Don’t turn the pile: We often turn compost piles in the summer to aerate them which speeds up the process. However, in the winter, turning compost introduces cold air into the pile. That can slow things down.

Cool Uses for Your Winter Compost Pile

The big advantage of winter compost piles is that they are a free source of heat. This heat can be utilized to keep growing food, as well as warming up spaces without using any resources. Heat just happens with compost.

• Make a winter garden bed: A winter compost pile (or piles) can be positioned around the garden bed, blocking first the north side and then providing some shelter to the east and west. This will make a wind block for polar winds coming from the north, a sun pocket to capture the sun’s warmth coming from the south, and the compost pile will provide extra warmth and fertility all the while. This arrangement can help to grow food during the winter.
• Heat the greenhouse: Rather than putting the compost outside, it can be compiled in a greenhouse. First of all, the compost pile will stay warmer, so it’ll break down more quickly. Secondly, the heat created from the compost pile will help to warm the greenhouse.
• Build a water heater: A hot compost pile—one that is built all at once, say out of a lot of wood chips and fresh grass clippings—can be built with a hose coiled up incrementally in the center of it. The inside of the compost pile will get to be well over 100 F, sometimes nearing 200, heating the water in the hose running through the middle of it. This water can be used for hot showers or to run through a makeshift radiator, such as in a greenhouse.

Using Winter Compost

In the end, the compost we make over the winter months will be ready right in time to be fertilizer for the spring garden which, for most of us, is the main reason for having a compost pile. No doubt, that fertility is fantastic, but isn’t it great that we can make good use of the compost pile in the meantime?

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