Is it possible to over compost?

[Nik]

Hi,

I put my garden and kitchen waste in an anaerobic compost bin, I emptied it at the weekend for the first time in a year and it was full of lots of lovely red worms doing their business (lots of birds in my garden so they didn't last long, poor fellas).
Now the top half was nice crumbly stuff recognisable as compost, but the bottom half was more like soil, claggy and dense. Can you leave compost too long, or does it have a best before?

[Kristen]

I suspect that is a result of it having composted anaerobically - that would make it claggy like the stuff out of the bottom of a pond. Leaving it in the air for a while should fix that.

Do you need to compost anaerobically going forwards? (You might be composting meat and cooked food etc?)

[Nik]

I went anaerobic because I'm just lazy. I did put meat in but I got rats living in it so I try to avoid that now.

[Two_Sheds]

It's not hard to compost 'properly'. Get your mix of browns & greens right, and shove in a few air pockets via scrunched newspaper or whole egg boxes

[Flummery]

Turn it a few times too.

[Storming Norman]

It sounds a bit like wormery compost rather than the usual mixed compost to me.

I emptied my worm bin recently [I only do that annually - this bin is all kitchen waste and nothing else and its put in a compost bin full of worms which I don't mix at all] - the bottom layer was very dense and soil like & seemed pretty heavy/slightly wet - All the output was stuffed with worms. I used it to top dress my pots/beds. I understand its very strong stuff, like plant food, so you night need to use it lightly.

Might be worth trying to keep the worms as best you can if it is producing decent compost for you; especially if you can afford to leave it long enough for the worms to do the composting for you, which takes ages for this quantity.

I have 2 other traditional compost bins but keep this one going with the worms as its such a nice product, close to the house so easy access, and because its only kitchen waste it tends not to produce too many weeds in use, so great for the pots.