Look at my compost pile. Don't you agree that it is a thing of mystery and beauty? On a freezing morning, it's 62 degrees inside.
It’s the end of Week #3 in the life my brand new food garden. November 21 by the calendar. The compost pile I built two weeks ago on one end of this 5′x20′ garden patch is looking…well…settled. To the casual observer, it is a pile of old leaves and garden trash. To me, its builder, the guy who will badly need compost next spring for this little garden, the pile looks like the future of food. And it makes me anxious. Is it working? Are we making compost here? There is really only one way to find out: measure the temperature at the core, in the center, at its heart, the place where the microbial life, if it is active at all, will be cooking up.
So yesterday I ran the probe from my indoor-outdoor thermometer deep into the pile. And behold! Heat! Yesterday afternoon the temp at the core was 63 degrees. Last night the air temp dropped below freezing. But my compost pile kept cooking at 62. Now, we’re still quite a ways from the 140 degrees that a pile will reach in warm weather, but as Joan pointed out this morning at 7 a.m., as we sat in our living room drinking coffee and huddling under a blanket to avoid having to start a wood fire, it was warmer in our compost pile (62 degrees) than it was in our living room (58 degrees). And yes, people are heating greenhouses and supplementing hot water systems by tapping the heat in compost piles.
