u/Ancient-Patient-2075 — reddlx

Has anyone's active compost pile ever actually smelled of pee?

I am wondering if this really happens or if it's a (sub)urban legend and a story to scare new composters with. I have an allotment in a community garden, there's a traditional outhouse and it rarely if ever stinks of pee. Hundreds of people pee there. I have hard time imagining the smell of pee surviving an active compost pile, those microbes are big hungry. Perhaps it's different if it's a container compost and you don't turn it much? I don't know I just pile stuff.

Anyway tell about that time your compost stank of pee pee. Or of course it wasn't yours but your neighbour's or something. I want to know if this actually happens.

reddit.com

u/Ancient-Patient-2075 — 3 days ago

▲ 38 r/composting

My first batch!

I built my first hot pile last August or so. I can't believe this used to be mostly horsetail and creeping charlie and couch grass and other awful weeds like that, cardboard, straw and piss. Some coffee grounds. I piled it all including the seedheads and there's a sprouted seed here and there but honestly not many. No roots with a sign of life life in them. Damn.

Wouldn't have happened without this sub so thank you!! 😁

(Not gonna shift it, just goes into flower beds as is.)

u/Ancient-Patient-2075 — 4 days ago

▲ 11 r/composting

I made it late in the autumn, 12 bales of hay and 60+ pumpkins if I remember correctly. Or was it more? The experience was so terrible I went back to gym haha. It had enough time to get hot once but then came the sleet and it never heated back up again.

But that's no fresh straw! A lot of nice dark stuff smelling of earth, I made my neighbour smell it too. I'll let it sit for a few weeks more and then use it in some flower beds. It seems to me some nice, soft rotten straw improves this damn clay so much. Got some other goodies too like crumbly ripe stuff from last summer and just commercial horseshit compost from a trusty local producer.

I'm going to plant so so many flowers 😎

(Will be a few weeks before building the next pile!)

(Yes I have the wonkiest thumbs.)

u/Ancient-Patient-2075 — 9 days ago