Why Your Compost Smells

The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers

Epic Gardening

Home & Garden, Education, Leisure, How To

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 25 May 2022

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If your heap is a stinky mess, Tony O’Neill explains the number one cause and how to remedy it. Connect With Tony O'Neill: Tony O’Neill is the founder of Simplify Gardening, a blog, YouTube channel, and the author of the upcoming book Composting Masterclass: Feed The Soil Not Your Plants. Buy this book on: Amazon UK Bookstore US Bookstore AUS Bookstore Simplify Gardening YouTube Shop the Store As an exclusive for listeners, use code EPICPODCAST for 5% off your entire first order on our store, featuring our flagship Birdies Raised Beds. These are the original metal raised beds, lasting up to 5-10x longer than wooden beds, are ethically made in Australia, and have a customizable modular design. Shop now and get 5% off your first order. Get Our Books Looking for a beginner's guide to growing food in small spaces? Kevin’s book, Field Guide to Urban Gardening, explains the core, essential information that you'll need to grow plants, no matter where you live! He also wrote Grow Bag Gardening to provide you with specialized knowledge that can bring you success when growing in fabric pots. Order signed copies of Kevin’s books, plus more of his favorite titles in our store. More Resources Looking for more information? Follow us: Our Blog YouTube (Including our Epic Homesteading and Jacques in the Garden channels) Instagram (Including Epic Homesteading, Jacques, and Chris) TikTok Facebook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you have a compost pile and it has started to get a little bit smelly, well, you're probably
0:18.9	not alone.
0:19.9	I think Tony, this is probably a thing that happens to almost everyone making compost for the
0:23.7	first time.
0:24.7	So Tony O'Neill is back on the show, founder of Simplified Gardening, and author of the
0:28.3	upcoming Web Composting Masterclass.
0:30.5	Tony, what would be the main reasons at least why someone's compost starts to smell?
0:36.7	Again, I think that the main controlling factor here is moisture, as I've spoken about
0:43.5	earlier on, the compost if it gets too wet, this pushes or fills up the air pockets with
0:50.4	moisture in the compost pile and sort of expels that air out to the pile.
0:56.1	Because of that, it turns anaerobic, and that's where the smell comes from.
1:00.2	It's caused by hydrogen sulfide, so it'll smell like rotten eggs.
1:05.8	So one of the important things to sort this out is ensuring that you've got good water
1:11.7	management and good airflow, and that's the best way from creating your compost to become
1:17.4	a mess in the first place.
1:19.3	Now a lot of people will think that's the end of that compost, you know, when it gets
1:23.5	that smelly mess and they'll scrape it up and, you know, they'll put it in bags and
1:27.4	they'll throw it away, but you can recover from this.
1:31.8	And the best way to do this is we need to absorb that moisture.
1:36.8	To do this, we need to literally turn that pile out onto, you know, a tap or something
1:42.3	like that, and then we need to rebuild this pile and we would use a lot more carbon in
1:48.8	the pile.
	...

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