Our Compost | Thunder Gardens

This pile is 60°C in the middle.

That heat is billions of living things at work. Give them a season and they turn our leftovers into the soil your food grows in.

60°

How it works

From trimmings to topsoil

Nothing leaves this farm as waste. Everything the kitchen, the field and the coop produce comes back here and starts again.

We gather

Vegetable trimmings, spent crops, straw and coop bedding get layered together as they come off the farm.

It heats

Within days the microbes multiply and the core climbs. That heat is what finishes weed seeds and breaks tough stems down.

55 to 65°C at the core

We turn it

Turning folds fresh air back in and moves the outside edges into the hot centre. The pile fires up again each time.

It cures

Months of slow finishing follow. When it is ready it is dark, crumbly and smells like a forest floor after rain.

1 tsp

A single teaspoon of finished compost holds billions of living organisms. That living community is what feeds our beds.

The recipe

What goes in the pile

A good pile is a balance of wet and dry, green and brown. We adjust it all season long by feel, by smell and by temperature.

Greens

nitrogen
  • Vegetable trimmings and field culls
  • Spent crops pulled at the end of a bed
  • Fresh grass and green weeds
  • Coffee grounds from the kitchen

Browns

carbon
  • Straw and dried plant stalks
  • Autumn leaves
  • Wood chips and shavings
  • Plain cardboard and paper

From the coop

the engine
  • Poultry manure with its bedding

Roughly three parts brown to one part green,
moist as a wrung out sponge.

The barn

Why poultry manure matters

It brings the nitrogen

Poultry manure is the richest nitrogen source on the farm. A little of it lifts the whole pile and gets the heat going faster than anything else we add.

The bedding comes with it

Shavings and straw arrive already mixed in, so the carbon and the nitrogen show up together in close to the right balance.

We let it finish completely

Raw manure is strong stuff. We give ours the full hot phase and a long cure, so what reaches the vegetable beds is stable, mature compost that feeds the soil gently.

Every year the beds hold water longer, the roots run deeper and the harvest gets better. That is compost doing its slow, patient work, and it is why we keep building this pile.