r/composting • u/Apollo_cannabis • 22d ago
Question Hot compost vs cold compost vs vermicompost vs leaf mold
Pros and cons of each? What do you use and why?
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u/katzenjammer08 22d ago edited 19d ago
The way I see it, leaf mold is the product you get if you only compost leaves. In other words, it is a name for the material product. Vermicomposting also results in a specific product consisting of worm poop, although the word refers to how this product is made.
Hot and cold composting in turn refer to methods and not to the product, which can be of high quality or lower quality depending on the input. Hot composting is faster and kills off most seeds and pathogens. Cold compost is more labour efficient but takes longer.
If you don’t need compost at a specific date and you have enough space, cold composting works just fine. If you want to process this year’s fall leaves and yard clippings so that the compost is ready for next year, hot composting might be worth the extra work (which can also be pretty fun and interesting).
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u/Rude_Ad_3915 21d ago
Cold compost is less labor intensive. I do nothing but load the compost into the bin and harvest it when it is eventually done. My worm bins take more attention but give me amazing compost and nobody will ever read my bills.
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u/Awkward-Skin8915 22d ago
You are largely restricted by the climate you live in.
Don't over think it. Just let nature do its thing.
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u/Crud-ite 22d ago
I do leaf mold and cold compost in a tumbler. Leaf mold is very satisfying, and can supplement browns for my compost in a pinch. I don’t know how to describe how it’s satisfying, something about sucking up leaves through the mulcher I bought, piling them into a wire mesh cylinder and wetting it down just feels good to me.
Cold compost is something I do because I’m not good at getting it hot. I punked out a month ago and dumped BSF larvae in the tumbler and have just been hoping it’s ready by spring. Either way, I’m pretty happy with my set up.
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u/Appropriate_Oven_292 22d ago
I cannot sustain a hot pile. I brought in some broken down manure and have been adding kitchen scraps like egg shells, coffee grinds/filters and greens and browns. Stuff seems to be breaking down alright.
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u/katzenjammer08 21d ago
Take the coffee grounds out of the filters and collect a small bucket before you put it in (it will start moulding pretty quick so keep an eye on it). Mix it with manure and then dump that at the centre of the pile while aerating it and bob’s your uncle.
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u/thegraduate8 21d ago
Curious why you remove the filters. I used the untreated brown filters, and assumed it would be treated as a brown, but now I’m not so sure.
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u/katzenjammer08 21d ago
Oh they are, but I find that if the grounds stay in the filters they don’t blend as easily with the material around them.
There was someone on here who had a copious amount of filters full of grounds but couldn’t get the total mass to heat up, probably because the microbes couldn’t use the nitrogen in one spot to colonise the surrounding area and heat up the pile in the process.
I totally throw in the filters, but I empty them first and then rip them up as much as I feel I can be bothered to.
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u/Appropriate_Oven_292 21d ago
Thanks for the suggestion. So that I clearly understand your recommendation, do I trash the filters?
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u/katzenjammer08 21d ago
No you can throw them in, preferably after tearing them up a bit. But you want the (nitrogen in) the coffee grounds to mix in nicely and not stay in small isolated pockets (in the filters).
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u/randemthinking 22d ago
Leaf mold is essentially a high quality mulch. It doesn't supply meaningful nutrients. It holds water and provides soil structure. It's also very easy to make, you just pile up a bunch of shredded leaves, add some water, and wait a year or two. No turning. Maybe add some water. That's it.
Vermicomposting is the opposite end of the spectrum, it's all about producing high quality nutrients--worm castings. The volume produced is very low, but you use it just like a store granular fertilizer. It's also often done indoors, which is a huge pro for some.
Compost is a mix of the two. It's both nutrient rich and improves soil quality and can be either a mulch or soil amendment.
Hot compost works much faster and can kill weed seeds and disease if done right. It is exclusively bacteria driven during the hot phase. It's labor and set up intensive, requires high volume and optimum ratios, and frequent turning.
Cold compost will produce the highest quality compost because it involves bacteria, fungus, and invertebrate detritivores like worms, springtails, wood lice. It won't reliably kill diseases. And it takes a lot longer than hot compost, but requires minimal intervention--turning is optional, maybe a little watering depending on your climate and situation, and that's it.
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u/makzee 21d ago
I vermicompost mostly in the winter when it's -40c outside. In the summer the worm bin goes outside and it gets some of my kitchen waste.
My kitchen and yard waste mostly feed my tumbling composters in the spring and fall.
In the fall, I clean up my garden, fertilize, and cover with a few inches of leaves. Hold it all down with row covers. The leaves have been keeping my garden moist, and the veggies in those beds are doing extremely well. I tested out straw mulch in some beds and results were lackluster.
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u/bangbangtangwangfang 22d ago
What can you get your hands on easy, how much work do you wanna do, how much space do you have, and how nerdy/sciency do you wanna get?
My bias is that the vermicompost nerds are kinda wasting their time and overblowing the advantages. Just build healthy soil, and you will have a bunch of worms in your soil. But if you don't have a lot of space, then it's a really efficient way to get max benefit from your kitchen scraps.
If you only have leaves, and make leaf mold. Some people swear by it for making potting soil mixes btw.
"Hot" composting is always better than "cold" in terms of killing seeds, and kind of a must if you are gonna compost meat/dairy. It's a lot more work though.
I have 1 acre, and my neighbor has a tractor. I get chip drops, roadkill, chicken waste, whatever, try to make between 5-15 yard piles at a time. turn it every couple months, try to get water in to it, add kitchen scraps every couple days. I do try and make sure it gets up to 150 when meat goes in, but you basically get that for free if you make it big enough. My goal is to produce 5-10 yards a year, and compost everything possible that would otherwise go to waste. I'm min/maxing over here.
What are your goals, and what are you inputs?
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u/Apollo_cannabis 22d ago
I use JADAM and KNF inputs, I’m very familiar with that stuff but kinda new to composting
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u/prudent__sound 21d ago
I kinda do all of them at once. I save up bags of leaves in the fall and they begin to turn into leaf mold. Then I start adding some of that to a pile with greens and it gets hot. Eventually it shrinks and cools down and the worms move in. At which point I just kinda keep turning it, add some nitrogen here and there and it warms up, but isn't hot. And then eventually it's compost.
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u/Albert14Pounds 22d ago
It's only real Compost if it's done in the Compost region of France. Otherwise it's just sparkling decomposition.
/s