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Hey, everybody.
Chuck here with another edition of our Think Spring playlist.
And right now, this is something you should all be doing, which is composting.
You can learn a thing or two about it in this episode Composting Colon, Nature's Most Interesting Process.
It's really not too hard, and it really means a lot.
So give it a shot.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh, the man, Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.
And I think I neglected to say last time.
Yeah, you did.
Guest producer Noel is with us.
That's right.
So if you listened to the Shroud of Turin episode, And you were like, man, that sounds great.
Yeah, that was Noel.
Thanks, Noel. show today, I've been replaying one of my favorite Simpsons jokes ever.
Over and over in my head.
I laughed already just hearing Simpsons jokes.
It was from one of the Halloween episodes when they did the Nightmare on Elm Street riff.
This is old, old ones.
Yeah.
Where groundskeeper Willie was Freddy Krueger and he turned into, I think, like a shredder or a tractor or something and ran over People or something.
Sure.
And said, when I'm done, they're gonna need to do a compost boredom.
Oh, wow, that is a bad joke.
Yeah, it was really good.
I mean, The Simpsons didn't get too punny, but that was a good one.
Well, anything goes on a treehouse of horror.
Yeah.
You know?
Agreed.
So you know, there's a bunch of cities that have kind of gotten woke to the idea that we should be recycling or composting our food.
Did you know that?
Sure.
I saw a stat that said something like 40% of food gets wasted.
But I got suspicious because I also saw that 40 of the stuff that goes to municipal landfills or trash is food waste.
Which doesn't necessarily mean it's wasted food, because I don't think you would count like a banana peel as food waste.
Or as wasted food.
No, it's a box.
They're not counting food packaging as food waste.
No, but I think they're counting everything that has to do with food that could conceivably be eaten as wasted food, which is not the same as food waste.
The point is, the legitimate stat that I saw just about everywhere is that if you took all the garbage that the United States throws away into a landfill, 40 of that is food waste.
And I'm sure some of it is, a whole cake.
Some complete moron threw a whole cake away for no good reason.
I was on a diet.
Well, that's actually a pretty good reason, but you know what I'm saying.
40% of all that trash is food.
The problem is, you might say, well, who cares?
Trash decomposes, that's great.
That's true, it does decompose.
But in the landfills that the United States uses, we make sure they're anaerobic.
Oxygen doesn't get down there.
So a whole different decomposition process takes place.
And in a landfill, in anaerobic decomposition, methane is produced.
And methane is bad news.
Methane is something on the order of 70 worse.
I know there's a much more scientific way to put it, but it's 70 badder than carbon dioxide as far as greenhouse gases go.
70% more potent, how about that?
So you don't want methane.
If you have to choose between methane and carbon dioxide, you want to go with carbon dioxide.
And it just so happens that if you compost food waste, mostly carbon dioxide is produced, methane's not.
So if you're diverting this food waste from the landfill, there's a whole bunch of different stuff you're doing.
Number one.
You're saving all that 40 of the space for actual trash, so you're extending the life of your land.
Sure.
You're keeping all that methane from being produced.
And, as if it couldn't get any better, you are creating an amazing fertilizer that you can use to grow.
You could grow a tree out of a shoe.
This fertilizer is so good.
The old shoe tree.
Yeah, we've danced around this a lot.
Well, you just referenced our, and I don't like to toot our own horns a lot, but that landfills episode was great.
Landfills and don't forget the plasma incinerator one.
Yeah.
Basically any of our waste management ones are mwah.
Yeah, what else?
I think gorilla gardening we touched on this some and a couple of others we've mentioned composting.
And to the extent where I thought we had done one on composting.
Not yet.
But we had not until about five and a half minutes ago.
And that's a guess, so if you write in and say, like, it was eight minutes, Chuck.
You're grounded.
So, like you mentioned, I don't think these numbers are accurate anymore, but we generate, let's just say, a lot of millions of tons, hundreds of millions of tons of trash, and about 25 to 30 of that is recovered through recycling, which includes composting, which is good.
But that number, if it was 70%, would be amazing.
Does that include composting, that recycling number?
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, if it'd be 70, that'd be great.
Yeah.
80, why not?
Yeah, let's shoot for 90.
Well, supposedly Seattle itself has a goal of something like 60 to 70 of all of its trash being recycled by the end of the year.
Of course they do, because Seattle does it right.
And they actually have compulsory, mandatory composting now.
You have to compost if you live in the city of Seattle.
Why don't I live there?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I ask myself that a lot.
You know, Emily and I went for our two shows ago on that lovely spring weekend.
Oh, it was gorgeous.
And we stayed extra in Seattle and after we were like, we're moving here, that's it.
It's a great town.
I've said it before on the show, dogs and bars.
That was all it took.
Yeah.
Dog bartenders.
But again, dogs playing poker.
Sure.
Again, it's easy to fall in love with Seattle on a perfect weekend in April.
Yeah, I hear it rains there a lot though.
I'd still live there.
It's a great place.
And you know what?
You may see us again this year, Seattle.
Tease, tease.
You're such a tease.
All right.
So composting is great for a thousand reasons, but one, first and foremost, is that it's not hard to do and it's not expensive to do.
If you just wanna be and there are many different levels of composting from big city programs to the home farmer that takes it super seriously.
If you just want to lessen the impact a little bit on your landfill, your local landfill, feel like you're doing the right thing and get a little bit of nutrient-rich goodness fertilizer to use, you can have just a small little composting operation going on at your house.
Yeah, this is all you need.
Organic waste.
And we don't even mean something that's organic.
We mean organic, meaning it's composed mostly of carbon.
It was once alive at one point, right?
Yeah, and I made a poopy noise, which you can't use poop.
No, that's night soil.
That's the opposite of what I should have done.
What's a banana sound?
That's a banana sound, right?
You need soil, you need water, you need air or oxygen.
Right, so the organic waste is the stuff you're gonna have broken down which, in this case, in the case of a compost pile, is food.
The soil.
Well, partially, sure.
But no, no, it's food for the things that are in the soil.
Oh, oh, yes.
Right, it's an energy source.
Yes, yes.
And nutrient source for what's in the soil.
So you add soil.
When you're adding soil, you're basically adding starter culture. to the compost.
What you're doing is grabbing microbes from say, in your yard and putting them on the compost pile and say dinner's on boys.
They eat and poop.
Yes.
But you don't want to poop in it.
You need a little bit of water, like you said, to keep it moist, but you don't want to keep it over wet, because microbes like slightly moist soil.
And then air, because again, again, this is really, really important.
You can let your compost pile degrade anaerobically, but it's gonna produce methane, which is bad for the environment.
Bad for your neighbors.
Bad for your neighbors, bad for you.
It's gonna stink.
It might blow up.
Who knows?
You don't want to smoke near what's called a passive compost pile.
So you want to just introduce oxygen.
And all this sounds very complicated.
It's not.
It's hitting it with your hose.
And by that I mean spraying water on it with your hose.
I just realized you can hit something with your hose too.
It's like turning it over.
Right?
With a pitchfork.
To add oxygen.
It's as simple as that.
Yeah, it's really easy.
So what you're gonna end up with, Ian, like we said, is really fertilizer, but it's called humus.
Don't call it hummus.
No, that's different.
That's two M's, right?
This has just one M and those little microorganisms in there, they're gonna break this stuff down, they're gonna eat it, they're gonna poop it out and they're gonna multiply and there's gonna be, we'll talk about the critters a little more later, but there are gonna be different critters along the way that eat those critters than critters that eat those critters.
And it's going to get really hot up in there.
It might steam.
Then it's going to cool back down.
It's going to get smaller.
And it's just like this little micro environment.
It is.
Really, really neat.
There's actually a food web in there.
There's a lot of physics and chemistry that's going on.
It is very neat.
I'm fascinated by it too.
But the upshot of composting is that you're taking something and it's being broken down into its constituent parts so that it can be reused by plants and the whole circle of life can start over again.
Yeah, you're sort of just accelerating the natural process of rot.
You're optimizing it.
Yeah, like you mentioned a passive composter, which is to say lazy hippies.
You could just throw all that junk out of your window if you wanted, in a big pile and throw some grass clippings on and throw your fall leaves on there.
Just leave it there.
And that thing will eventually compost itself.
Well, again, it'll produce methane.
You'll blow up.
Or you could turn it every now and then and maybe avoid that.
No, I think that makes it an active pile.
Well, slightly active pile then.
Right.
I don't mean like every other day.
Right.
I mean just to avoid methane maybe.
But that would still technically be an active pile.
It would be a poorly managed active pile.
Yeah, slightly active.
Poorly managed.
So...
I'm serious, that's what they call it.
I know.
Okay.
We like to make up our own names for things.
I didn't know you were gonna cease that in year nine.
I got you, sorry.
We'll call that the doobie pile.
Okay.
No, it's called active management.
I just wanted to make sure that we got it on the record.
So the big goal here is to reduce your waste.
They say in this article, ultimately will save you tax money because your landfill won't.
I thought that was hilarious.
Yeah, I mean, don't count on seeing any tax breaks coming anytime soon.
But that got William F. Buckley's attention.
Probably so.
So how do you do this?
Let's say you want to start composting.
There's a one, two, three, four, five step process to get this thing going.
Okay, well let's talk about them.
First thing you want to do is just pick out the place you want to do it.
Right.
Because it's a bit of a mess.
It doesn't have to be necessarily, but depending on your neighbors they might be like well great.
I'm glad you started an unsightly pile of kitchen rubbish and food waste.
I can see from my deck.
Thanks a lot for that.
So that's something you want to keep in consideration.
Apparently, even if you do have a very well-managed active pile, what would you call that?
I'm not making up funny names anymore.
No more jokes.
I've ruined it.
It still may stink here or there.
Sure.
So you want it kind of away from the house, but not so far away that if you're feeling lazy you're not going to go out and tend to it on a daily or every other daily basis.
Yeah, and if you have that much land, you have a compost pile a mile from your house.
Hmm.
Good for you.
You got some acreage.
There might be some local rules, either from your HOA heaven forbid if you have to belong to one of those or maybe just your municipality might have rules and regulations.
So check with them first.
Sure, that's what everyone does before they start a compost pile.
They go down to City Hall and say tell me the rules and regulations surrounding composting in my yard.
I think the first thing everyone does is start throwing their eggshells out the window.
Sure.
That's how it always starts.
Right.
It's like, I'm tired of these things being in my trash.
They recommend downwind, because like you said, it might stink a bit.
Sun is good in a way, but you don't want it baking in the sun all day.
No, because it'll dry it out.
Remember, you want it to be kind of moist.
Yes.
And the sunlight can actually dry it out.
Sure.
So you want, apparently, the best place to put it is under a deciduous tree.
Good spot.
Yeah, because in the wintertime there's no leaves on the tree, so the sun's going to keep it warm when it's cold.
Yeah.
But during the summer, it's going to be shaded by the tree, so it won't dry out.
It's just perfect.
It is.
Deciduous tree equals love.
Yeah.
Wind is good to provide a little air, but you don't want it blowing, scattering the stuff all over the place, drying it out again, no good.
What else?
Drainage, don't start one in that old baby pool that you don't want to throw out.
Especially if your baby's in there.
Yeah, you want good drainage.
Generally, you build either build a bin.
We'll talk about this stuff actually right now, but it's off the ground.
Sure.
It's on legs.
Yeah.
Although you can have a pile.
Right.
But, you know, generally you want to build a bin or buy a bin.
Right.
And those things sit off the ground.
Right.
Because of drainage.
That's part of it for sure.
Yeah.
You also want dirt rather than, say, like a concrete pad or something like that.
Yeah, don't compost in your driveway.
Right.
It's not a good idea.
As far as structures go, like you said, you can go buy one.
They're not very expensive from what I understand, right?
Yeah, it depends on the size.
You can also say go buy some cinder blocks and build something like that.
Sure.
But basically you can cut compost structures into two.
There's a single bin and there's a three bin system.
So in the single-bin system, you put new stuff on top, new banana peels.
This is what I think of when I think composting, you know?
Banana peels?
Sure, yeah.
You put new stuff on top and then you take a pitchfork or shovel or something like that and you work it in to the compost.
And at the bottom of this structure say it's open when you're walking up to it.
The finished compost will accumulate at the bottom.
And the reason it accumulates at the bottom is because it's a finer grain.
And that's it.
Single bin, new stuff at the top.
Easy peasy.
Stuff that's in process in the middle, stuff that's finished in the bottom, and it will just naturally kind of separate like that.
Yeah, and when we're talking structure like that, if you want to build one, you know, build a wood frame and it's like got chicken wire walls and a chicken wire bottom and that gives you the air and if you've got something to collect it underneath, it's going to fall, you know, when it's small enough.
Right.
Some other stuff might fall, you may need to add it back in.
Yeah.
But with the three-bin system, you've got, well, you've got three bins.
You've got the starter stuff, you've got the once it starts to break down little stuff, and then you have the more finished product.
And you have to actively manage that system.
Yeah, that system sounds unnecessarily difficult.
I kind of like it.
Oh, you're a three-bin guy?
Well, we're about to get into this for real.
We've been lazily composting for a while.
But we're doing our whole backyard.
We're getting rid of our grass, basically.
Oh, yeah?
100% of it.
What are you going to do?
Compost? mulch and beds and plants and herbs and walking paths.
Zeriscape, you're gonna put cacti in and all that?
No cacti, though we do have a palm tree, we've had that forever though.
There you go.
Yeah, just getting rid of the grass basically.
Because it takes up so much water?
Nah, just, it's just, It's not good grass to begin with and I'm not the best about cutting it.
Lawn mowers are terrible for the environment.
Plus you don't water enough.
You never let a quarter inch of water accumulate on the surface.
Exactly.
Yeah, and it'll look nicer.
So part of this and this company that's doing it is it's not just a landscaping company.
They're a bunch of hippies.
So they're designing it in such a way that it feeds itself and part of that is composting.
Anyway, long way of saying we're gonna start for real composting very shortly.
And you're going with the three-bin structure?
I don't know.
I think I'm gonna build it.
Well, it's the structure Emily tells me to build.
That's the easiest way to say it.
But if you buy one, like you were saying, there's all different kinds.
Just look it up online or go to a hardware store and many of them will look like a big barrel on legs and it literally turns like has a crank on it to where you can turn this thing in circles.
It's old timey.
So you don't have to use a pitchfork at all.
Right.
You don't have to muss your hands or your hair.
It's like a bingo spinner.
Yeah.
But with banana picks.
Have you ever played bingo?
Like legit bingo in a room with hundreds of people?
Not hundreds.
Well, more than like you and Yumi.
Yes.
Like a bingo parlor, is that what they're called?
Yeah.
I've actually gone to a couple of senior retirement homes and helped out with bingo.
Wow.
And that's a pretty cool experience, actually.
Do you run the bingo?
Or do you just play and kind of crack jokes?
I'm not qualified to run the bingo.
Right, right.
Just walk around and point out if somebody missed one that was called, that kind of thing.
But do you want to talk about taking it seriously?
Do they?
Oh, my God. and then you have to be a certified bingo master to run the show?
Yeah, and they'll tell you to hurry up and shout if you're not loud enough or fast enough or going too fast.
So the point is not to have fun.
No, the point is to win.
Wow, what do they win?
They have prizes?
Yeah, nothing much usually.
I mean, but you can.
I think, like, you can play bingo in casinos for thousands and thousands of dollars.
Yeah.
Usually at old folks' homes they don't, you know.
Sure.
There's not thousands of dollar prizes.
Just honey buns and cigarettes.
Right.
Right, exactly.
All right, well, let's take a break here after we have talked structure.
And we'll talk a little bit about what kind of junk you want to throw in that pile on the Adventures of Curiosity Cove podcast.
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All right, Chuck.
So we're talking what you want to throw in the pile, right?
You got your bin.
Either a triple, three banger.
Got your sight.
Or a single.
You got your sight.
You bribed your neighbor to look the other way.
You bribed your neighbor.
Exactly.
You bought a goat.
Oh, man.
Talk about green living.
My neighbor has goats now, like five of them.
Are they loud?
No.
Oh, that's great.
Every once in a while I hear them, but it's a joy to hear, so it's not like a rooster.
Do you wake up and look out and say, morning, Satan?
No.
Well, goats are one of my favorites, so it's kind of nice to have them around.
Are they baby goats or adult goats?
No, they're big ones.
I mean, she got them to maintain the property because she was tired of cutting.
I guess she didn't want to zero scape it, so she bought goats.
Anyway, it's awesome.
Kitchen waste.
Josh, that's what you want to throw in there.
Well, yeah, that's the first one.
That's the one that everybody says.
That's why you compost, right?
Yeah.
And yeah, banana peels.
Everybody knows that.
But did you also know you can compost apple cores in orange rinds?
You can also eat apple cores.
Yeah, you believe there is no such thing as a core, right?
Yes, because there's not.
Sane people who leave their apple cores left over, they can compost those things.
Those are the easy ones.
You can also do coffee grounds.
Yeah, that's a good one.
Paper filters?
Throw that filter and all in there.
Okay, so let's just say I ate maybe a whole pizza to myself.
I've got a couple of napkins wadded up.
What do I do with those, Chuck?
I think you can throw those napkins in there, Josh.
Yeah?
Isn't that crazy?
It is crazy.
Newspaper?
Yeah.
Corn cobs?
If you still read a newspaper, if you get your news on the internet, throw your laptop in there.
Watermelon rinds?
Yeah, seeds, leaves, the butt end of the asparagus that no one cooks.
Throw that junk in there.
You can also do yard waste too.
Sure.
Right, so you've got grass clippings, which we'll talk about in a second.
We got a couple warnings as far as grass clippings goes.
Not too much.
But let's say you're raking leaves or something like that, throw some leaves on there.
Yeah, good crunchy brown ones.
And you can also throw trimmings from your shrubs if you trim your woody shrubs.
The key here is this, Chuck.
You want to cut all this stuff up in small bits.
Yeah, don't throw a whole corn cob in there.
You can.
No.
Your compost pile will just throw it right back out.
Yeah, it'll just spit it right back out.
Right.
It's very funny.
It'll make a burping noise.
Yeah.
They say to shred the corn cob.
I don't have a corn cob shredder.
I don't either.
I've never thought about that.
I wouldn't waste my blender blade on chopping up corn cobs.
I think the point is you can break it into little pieces.
Sure.
You can break it into little pieces, though.
Yeah, you can probably cut a corn cob up.
Yeah, and you can.
Also, you can take all this stuff and chop it.
Anything you can put into smaller pieces the better because, as we'll see, what you're really doing is you're not just breaking it up.
You have to look at it like what you're doing is increasing the surface area so more microbes can work on it at once.
Yeah, like if you have, I know you hate broccoli, but.
Man, I hate broccoli.
You cut the little florets off and you've got that big green broccoli stalk.
Cut that thing up as small as you can.
Set it on fire.
You have patience for and throw that junk in there.
Yeah, basically channel your inner anal chef.
Gross.
You remember him?
The anal chef?
Yeah.
Was that a real thing?
Yeah, on Saturday Night Live.
Phil Hartman.
No, I don't remember that.
The anal retentive chef.
Oh, okay.
I forgot the retentive part.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I remember that.
That's a big qualifier.
I was like, I don't get that joke, mommy.
Remember the anal retentive chef?
Yeah, I do remember that now.
He'd start to if he was dicing green peppers and one of them was bigger than the rest.
He'd just be like okay well, you want to take those chunks and you want to put them into a paper towel, and then you want to fold that up and then you put that into some aluminum foil and you fold that up and you put that into a paper bag and you roll it up and then you staple it and then you throw it away.
Boy, man, what a loss that was.
Ugh, still makes me sad.
So you mentioned newspaper earlier.
If you live near the ocean and you've got your hands on some seaweed or some kelp, you can rinse that stuff off.
Right.
So you don't want all that salt content in there.
No.
But it's really good and nutrient rich if you rinse that off and put it in your compost pile.
Yeah.
And it's also good for you to eat, too.
I know I sound nuts, but just eat that stuff.
What do you mean?
It's so good for you.
Yeah.
Sawdust?
You don't eat that.
No, but like I'm building my compost bin, I can put that sawdust back in it.
How about that?
Yeah.
Pretty neat.
Circle of life, baby.
What should not you compost?
Night soil.
Which is poopy soil.
Yep.
That means your dog, your cat, you.
Don't go take a big dump of your compost pile.
No.
I know you want to.
No.
That's not good.
No.
Diseased garden plants, that's a big one.
Some of this stuff though, as we'll find, doesn't quite make sense, but it's just good to err on the side of garbage in, garbage out.
Except with compost.
If you put garbage, garbage in, then it's going to be really bad.
If you put good, healthy garbage in, it's gonna come out as quite good.
So you don't want to put any diseased plants in there.
Invasive weeds are another one too.
Yeah, but it says you can also put weeds in there.
So I guess you just need to figure out which ones are the bad ones.
Yeah.
So this specifically calls out buttercup's morning glory and quack grass.
I'm quite sure that there's plenty of seeds that wouldn't survive the composting process.
Yeah.
But apparently these do.
So stay away from the quack grass.
Yeah.
I think that was the big mantra at Woodstock.
Sure.
It's a gateway drug.
Don't have the yellow sunshine or the quack grass.
It was the brown acid.
Brown acid.
Which I mean, who wants brown acid?
And what about, you were talking about kitchen stuff, what about meat and dairy?
Oh, okay, that's controversial.
It is, because Emily has taken classes and they were like, no, don't use any of that.
Yeah.
That's like animal cells and fats in particular, they putrefy, they don't decompose.
And putrefaction makes some stinky stuff and I think it can also generate a lot of disease-bearing pathogens.
So I was surprised to see this article say, heck yeah, put it in there.
Well, and they kind of said in this article if you're really heavily managing this thing, you can do it.
But I don't know, I've just heard don't.
They said turn it into a slurry, which I don't wanna see Freud and Rich's blender at home.
Gross, with corn cob leavings on it.
But he said, whip it up into a slurry and as long as it's a good hot, actively managed pile, it won't be a problem.
I'm gonna go ahead and say I don't think you should do that.
I don't know what to do with the animal leavings, but I don't think you should compost it.
All right.
It might make sense to you to say, hey, I have an outdoor fire pit.
I bet that would be great in my composter.
No.
Incorrect.
Although this specifically says charcoal ashes.
I think that's... Any kind of charred ashes?
Yeah, like burnt wood is called charcoal.
So are you sure, because I know what you just said was true, but supposedly the entire Amazon basin and I learned this from the greatest book of all time 1491, by Charles C Mann the entire Amazon basin was a managed forest that the indigenous peoples down there had made completely fertile and fecund by, instead of slash and burn, they were using slash and char techniques.
And there was way more carbon locked into the charred tree stumps than there was the ashes, so it became more fertile.
So I have a question about that one.
You know, I'm gonna back off of my determined stance and say, I don't know.
It would make sense if it was coal.
Like if it was coal.
Well, like charcoal briquettes because they have cement and all sorts of chemicals and junk in them.
But if it's charred wood or wood ash, I wonder.
All right.
Somebody let us know.
Charles C. Mann, tell us.
The pesticide treated plants, you know my stance on pesticides, period.
Don't use them, but if you do, definitely don't put that stuff in there.
Because your whole thing here is you want a more or less organic compost pile. in the end.
And so one of the things that people love about compost is it actually is organic.
And we're going to explain how.
I didn't know this until we did this research.
But we'll explain how, because we're going to go through the process that your compost pile undergoes.
Right after this, on the Adventures of Curiosity Cove podcast what if the right fit isn't what everyone expects?
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All right, I did something we rarely do, which is look something up as we're podcasting, because it just sounded lazy to be like oh, we don't know this one.
Gardensalivecom says wood ashes are so strongly alkaline that it doesn't take a lot to upset the balance in the pile and stop the processing.
You can add a very small amount of wood ash from your fireplace or a wood-burning stove, but apparently not much.
So I think you were kind of right in that it's not completely foreboding, but it sounds like too much is not a good thing.
I think that's what Freud and Rich was saying, like don't even mess with it.
Okay, so why bother?
Put in animal fats instead.
Well and that's what the person from Gardens Alive was saying is like it's so little that it's not really going to make a difference, and if you're trying to get rid of it in a different way, she's like it's not really going to matter.
But it raises a great question, Chuck.
Why in the name of all things holy would it matter what the alkalinity is of your compost pile?
And I'll tell you why.
Because.
It's a chemistry experiment.
It is.
It's a chemistry experiment, but it's also a biological experiment.
You have a microcosm growing there.
And there's actually really easy things you can do to optimize this and basically create a Xanadu paradise for the microbes and primary and secondary and tertiary consumers of this stuff that you're putting in there to break down so that they just have the greatest life that any invertebrate or microbe ever had.
Alright, should we talk chemistry a bit then come back to just the management and stuff?
Alright, what you're really talking about here for an ideal composting scene You need a disco ball.
Right.
And you need a proper CN ratio, which is carbon to nitrogen ratio.
And depending on how wonky you want to get, if you want to start measuring things, you can do that.
But from what I gather, just try and do a lot to a little, about 30 to 1 carbon to nitrogen.
Right.
And eyeball it.
The rule of thumb is this.
If it's green and recently deceased, and by green, a nice banana peel would qualify as this.
If it's pliable and green or, again, recently deceased, it is high in nitrogen.
If it's brown and dried, it's high in carbon.
So you want to actually, when you're adding the compost, you want to just kind of layer this stuff in about those ratios 30 to one.
And there's actually tables like, if you're big time into this, there are tables out there that tell you just about exactly the carbon to nitrogen ratio in each individual thing.
But what we said earlier, you want to avoid grass clippings.
This is why, because they're too high in nitrogen.
And what happens when you have too much nitrogen?
It's bad.
Right.
It makes your pile stinky.
Yeah, is that where the methane starts creeping in?
That actually I think leads to ammonia gas.
Oh, okay.
Right.
But you also don't want too much carbon either, Chuck.
Yeah.
Because so carbon and nitrogen.
Carbon is like the building block and it's an energy source for these microbes.
Nitrogen is essential to their growth and their metabolic activity as well.
Yeah.
But when they have this in these concentrations, that's when they flourish.
Yeah, and the other problem with carbon too is it breaks down so slowly.
Well, it depends on the source.
Yeah, that's true, but generally a lot of the carbon sources like newspaper and corn cobs and stuff like that.
It's just a much slower process.
Right, right.
So they have much tougher structural support in their cells.
They have structural integrity.
Exactly.
They need to have a good saying that rhymes.
If it's yellow, let it mellow.
If it's brown, flush it down.
Sure.
I thought you were heading toward that.
I was just kind of like on the edge of my seat.
No.
Like if it's green.
I walked right past that one.
If it's brown.
Maybe there is one that we don't know.
Or maybe someone can write one.
Like a creative listener?
I'd love to hear it.
I'll bet we get a bunch of those.
All right, oxygen, if we're talking ratios.
And again, you can wonk out as much as possible.
But the good news is about your compost piles.
It's not like it needs to be like the oxygen that you need.
No.
Walking around to breathe.
Which is I think 21% in the atmosphere.
Yeah, that's what we have going on.
It can get by these aerobic microbes as low as 5%.
Yeah, that's cutting it close.
That's cutting it close.
They say try to hover somewhere around 10 or up.
Right.
How do you measure that?
You don't.
You just aerate your pile and it's fine.
By either turning it or you can do hold PVC.
Mm-hmm. and I guess that brings us kinda to the management part.
You don't just sit there unless you wanna have a totally passive pile.
And who wants that?
You have to manage this thing either every day or every other day, turn it like we were saying.
Either with the little crank, if you've got a handy little barrel unit, or with a pitchfork, or they call it a composting fork in here.
It's pretty fancy.
It's probably the same thing, isn't it?
It's the same thing as a pitchfork except like $50 more.
You wanna water it some, but again, do you wanna give watering advice?
You don't want it for me.
You don't want it to be soaking wet.
No.
You want it to be moist.
Yeah.
Damp.
People hate that word, so we'll say damp.
And again, I mentioned the perforated PVC pipes, that can help.
It says you can avoid turning it by having those pipes.
I would still turn it.
I would too, just to mix it up, right?
Yeah, but putting PVC pipes throughout your pile would make it really difficult to turn, so.
Well, you can pull them out.
I guess you could.
But getting them back in's a real pain.
You can stick them back in.
Another way to introduce oxygen is earthworms.
Oh man, this is where I go crazy.
Oh yeah?
We have a lot of worms on our property, just because there's a lot of worms in Georgia.
Yeah.
We did a great episode on earthworms, remember?
Yeah, and every time I find them, I pick them up, I show them to Emily and she immediately says throw it in the garden.
And that's because we weren't composting heavily.
Now it's going to be throw them in the compost pile.
But these guys are great because they naturally I mean they do a lot of things, but one of the things they do is naturally aerate by just tunneling through that stuff.
Yeah, so earthworms, and then worms in general, are probably the most important non-microscopic resident in your compost pile.
Yeah.
Because they do so much.
So worms, especially earthworms, and most types of nematodes, they actually go in and like, eat things.
A lot of the stuff that's in the compost pile, a lot of the food waste, right.
Or organic waste.
And in doing so, they break it down.
And as they break it down, they make it easier for the microbes to digest themselves.
Should we start with the microbes?
Yeah.
Okay.
So again this compost pile.
When you add food waste to the pile and add soil, you're introducing energy source to energy consumer okay.
Yes.
And at the base of this is microbial life bacteria mostly.
But the bacteria go to town, they start eating this stuff and the smaller it is.
The more surface area there is, the more the bacteria can eat.
And they actually take the nutrients out of this and use it for cellular respiration, which is why they need oxygen.
Because they take oxygen and combine it with the carbon and they create ATP, which they use as an energy source to power their cells and live and frolic and play.
And in doing so, they create carbon dioxide.
That's right.
So, as they're doing this, they're actually breaking the stuff down from what you'd recognize as a banana peel, closer and closer to that finished humus product.
Yes.
So you've got bacteria, and they're a big part of it.
And depending on the phase that the compost pile is in, there will be different kinds of bacteria in your compost pile.
Yeah, and it's not just bacteria.
There's fungi doing lots of work.
We mentioned nebatodes.
You're gonna eventually get mites in there and slugs.
You've already thrown your worms in.
Some millipedes doing some action.
All those cute little legs.
And overall, these are known as primary consumers.
Some are.
Are all of them primary consumers?
Well, they're listed by this person who made this fancy chart.
So then above that, Chuck, you've got the secondary consumers.
Secondo.
And those are the predators of the primary consumers, right?
And then you have tertiary consumers.
They're the predators of the secondary consumers.
And so you put all this together and what you have is a food web.
You have microbes breaking the stuff down, worms and stuff doing the same thing in some ways.
And then other predators, different graduated levels of predators preying on the smaller animals to keep their population in check and to keep everything in a perfect balance so that it's as efficient as possible.
And eventually a great white shark comes along.
It eats everything.
It eats the whole pile thanks to his Sharknado.
What gets me, though?
The best part of all this to me is that, if you look at the lifespan of a compost pile, from brand new to finished humus
From banana peel.
To humus.
Yes. it forms a bell as far as the temperature gradient goes, right?
Yeah, it's really kind of cool.
So the first stage is the mesophilic stage.
Temperatures get up to, I think, 40 degrees Celsius.
I can't remember what that is in Fahrenheit.
Yeah, we'll go with Celsius though.
Okay.
So it's warmish.
And then, as the cellular respiration mounts and builds and more and more bacteria are born and start eating and carry this cellular respiration out.
The byproducts are CO2 and heat.
And heat starts to accumulate in the compost pile, so much so that it gets up to something like 50 to 60 degrees Celsius, which is like 100 to 150 degrees Fahrenheit.
Yeah, and at this point, your organisms are gonna change.
You're gonna have thermophilic.
These are little heat-loving critters and they move in because it's nice and warm.
They're snowbirds, they're desert dwellers, and they like it when it's warm.
But here's the thing is you wanna like you don't want it to get too hot, so you wanna continue to aerate and keep that temperature in check.
What you want is that natural bell to happen on its own.
Right, so the mesophilic bacteria die off or they go kind of dormant as it enters the thermophilic phase.
And then, after the thermophilic phase ends.
The reason it ends is because they've eaten up all of the stuff that's there to eat and only the hard stuff's left over, and so the thermophiles go away and some of the mesophiles come back and new stuff comes in, like actinomycetes actinomycetes, which are kind of like a weird fungi-bacteria cross and they break down the really hard woody, shrubby stuff.
And they finish it off.
And this third phase is called the curing phase, right?
And at the end of all of it, you have this great nutrient-rich humus.
But in the middle of that, when it gets really hot, it gets so hot Chuck, that pathogens that can make you sick, that can make animals sick, that can make plants sick, are actually killed off in the phase.
Which is why, when you get your hands on compost, on humus, It's organic.
It's been basically treated naturally to rid itself of parasites, pathogens, all sorts of bad stuff.
And all that's left is the nutrients that have been broken down in the process that a plant can use very easily.
And again, the circle of life starts over again.
Yeah, and I mentioned sun earlier can dry it out, but if it gets over 65 Celsius it's going to kill off so many microbes.
It's going to really slow down your process.
Right.
So that's another reason you turn it is to kind of keep, and again don't have direct sunlight, but it's going to keep that temperature where it does its thing, naturally.
Right.
Where you don't want to put a heat lamp on it.
You just wanna keep it moist, turn it over and let it do its thing.
And you might come out there on a chilly morning and there might be steam coming off of that sucker.
And dude, that's when you just like.
You go hot dog.
Yeah, hot diggity dog.
And you go inside and you eat a banana.
And you throw it on the pile.
All right, so when is it all over?
I just love, this is why I love earth science.
Yeah, it's really amazing.
Because it's like it requires a little bit of human management.
But then you kind of just step away and say do your thing.
It's really neat.
When is it over?
Well, you can tell, there's a few ways of being able to tell.
The temperature starts to go down.
If it's below 100 degrees Fahrenheit, it's out of the thermophilic phase.
And it's now into the mesophilic phase.
This says that it's probably done.
I disagree.
I think you probably want it even cooler than that, because the longer you let it cure, the more diverse the microbes inside are going to be, the better the soil that you use to amend it with is going to be.
Temperature is one.
One of it is just eyeball it, and if it's about 50 decomposed, like if you still see clearly a banana peel, then it's not done.
You don't wanna recognize this stuff as food at this point.
Or an eggshell or whatever.
And is it smaller?
If it's been reduced by 50 to 75 and it's dark, brown or black and crumbly and it looks kind of like soil, then you're cooking with gas, as my dad used to say.
The texture, did you say smooth or crumbly?
Yeah.
What about the smell?
Well, it shouldn't stink bad at this point.
No, it should smell earthy.
And actually, one of my favorites, the actinomycetes.
The actinomycetes.
They are the reason that soil and dirt has its smell.
It's those guys.
They give it its earthy smell.
Isn't that cool?
Yeah, and I think we did mention, you know that it's doing well along the way if it stops smelling.
It doesn't just stink the whole time.
Right.
And it's not going to smell earthy.
The soil that you add will smell earthy.
But when you grab a handful of humus, it should just fall through your fingers.
It should be the closer to black, the better.
And it should smell like everything associated with earth should smell like it's like the word earth.
That's what it should smell like.
Like you'll understand what earth smells like.
Yeah, they said peat moss, if none of this makes sense.
Go to your local hardware store or lawn and garden center and smell the peat moss.
Exactly, so now that it's done, you've got your wonderfully natural fertilizer, use it.
Spread it out in your garden, spread it out around your trees, throw it in your yard.
Spread it around your naked body and run around your yard?
If you want to.
That's what a doobie pile will make you do.
Or quack grass.
Yeah, stay away from that stuff.
It's basically like, the easiest way to put it, without getting too scientific, is it's gonna make everything better.
It's gonna increase soil microbes.
It's gonna increase nutrients and enhance them.
It's gonna improve the pH and chemistry of your soil, your yard soil structure.
And again, what you've just done is taken stuff and had it broken down into its components, unlocked it for your plants to use.
So your plants are gonna say, thank you, brother.
Pretty amazing.
Some people create a lot of it and sell it, but mainly people do this to just use around their house.
Yeah, and increasingly, towns are starting to do curbside composting pickup, food waste pickup.
Neat.
Where you got trash, recycling bin, food waste bin.
Banana peels.
Banana peels, right.
That's it.
All right.
Go forth and compost.
Yeah.
If you want to know more about composting, you can type that word in the search bar at HowStuffWorkscom.
Cornell actually also has a really great site about composting if you want to know more about the science of it.
You were very excited about that site.
Love that site.
And since I said Cornell, it's time for Listener Mail.
I'm going to call this Child Life Specialists.
We had a couple of these that wrote in.
Remember we talked about this?
In the pain scale episode.
And we kind of surmised what it was, and it turns out we were right.
And by the way, we heard from paramedics, doctors, quite a few people about the worst pain.
Yeah, you don't want a long bone fracture.
Yeah, almost 100% of them said a broken femur is like the worst pain you can experience.
And should we say why?
Yeah, go ahead.
Several reasons, right?
Right, because apparently it's a very sensitive area, but also because without that structure, your muscles start spasming, which just rocks the whole thing back and forth even more.
And then like fragmented bone hitting nerve and like all kinds of badness.
Yeah.
So steer clear of that.
Alright, so we heard from two.
I'm going to read the one, but I'm going to shout them both out.
Hey guys, very excited to hear you mention Child Life Specialist during your recent episode on Pain Scales.
As a Child Life Specialist myself, I thought we'd take the opportunity to tell you a little bit about it.
You are right, Chuck.
A child life specialist, we help kids deal with being hospitalized.
That's really the essence of our job.
We support children and families throughout stressful situations, such as hospitalizations, using our knowledge of child development and play to facilitate coping.
Child life specialists provide children with developmentally appropriate education about diagnoses and treatments, preparation and support for procedures and opportunities for normalization and play.
What a great job.
Seriously, I can't think of too many jobs that are more rewarding than that.
Seriously.
We also provide support for siblings and provide legacy building and memory making in end-of-life situations.
Our profession is very rewarding.
Josh, you are right.
She predicted you would say that.
And I love going to work every day.
To become a CLS, you must have a bachelor's or master's degree in child development or a related field, complete a 640-hour child life internship and pass a national certification exam.
You can visit www.childlife.org to learn more about it.
Thanks for what you guys do.
You've made all my road trips interesting.
And thanks for spreading the word about child life.
Maybe you can do an entire episode on our profession in the future.
She said future.
Okay.
And that is Natalie Valentine.
And also a big shout out to Amanda Butler from Auburn University who does that there.
Thanks for writing in, ladies.
It sounds like just a really, really great job.
Yeah, thanks to you both for that.
And thanks for everybody who has anything to do with making kids who are hospitalized feel better.
Hats off to you.
If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast or Josh M. Clark.
You can hang out with us on Facebookcom.
Slash Stuff You Should Know, or slash Charles W Chuck Bryant.
You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com.
And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworkscom.
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The human body is a beautiful machine, and keeping it running means understanding how it actually works.
Which is why this podcast will kill you is doing a multi-part series on sleep.
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When you consider what we know about sleep in humans, there's one rule that comes out.
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