The Pile That's Alive
A compost pile isn't rotting garbage sitting still. It's billions of tiny living things doing real work.
Carver's fifth rule: composting works because trillions of microbes are actually eating the pile from the inside — that work makes real heat, enough that a working pile can steam on a cold morning. Balance "browns" (dry leaves, cardboard) with "greens" (food scraps, grass clippings), and the microbes handle the rest.
Color in Carver and his steaming pile. There's more than one way to do this: a hot pile you turn and tend, a cold pile you just leave alone and wait longer on, or a worm bin where worms do the eating instead of microbes. Which one do you think Carver would pick?
About Gospel Carver
Seventy years outside in every kind of weather, and a notebook of planting records in his chest pocket going back decades. He moves slowly, but not from age — from attention, and he'll tell you flatly there's a difference. "Starting right" isn't a saying to him. It's the plain habit of never once skipping the boring first step.