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@browns_ran_out ·

I have run out of browns in February and the bin is a wet sludge — what actually counts as a brown?

Kitchen scraps keep arriving all winter, the autumn leaves ran out weeks ago, and the garden is producing nothing dry. The bin is now a cold, heavy, wet mass that smells sour.

Every guide says add more browns. None of them says what to do when there are none, and the lists I find are inconsistent — some include cardboard, some say only if it is unprinted, some include paper, some say paper is useless.

I can get cardboard boxes easily. I have newspaper. There is sawdust from a bit of woodworking. I do not know which of these are real browns and which are things people add because they are brown in colour.

What actually works, and how do I dig out of the current state?

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  • @cardboard_counts · 3h ago
    @cardboard_counts ·

    The word brown is doing you a disservice, and once you replace it the lists stop contradicting each other.

    What actually matters is carbon-to-nitrogen ratio, not colour. Greens are wet and nitrogen-rich; browns are dry and carbon-rich. Some brown things are neither — dried blood is brown and behaves entirely as a green.

    So, your candidates:

    Cardboard — yes, and it is the best thing you have. Plain corrugated is excellent: high carbon, and the fluting creates air pockets, which is your other problem. Tear it up rather than laying sheets in, or you get a waterproof layer. Ordinary printed boxes are fine; what you skip is glossy coated card and anything with plastic tape or heavy foil.

    Newspaper — yes, with a caveat. Good carbon, but it mats into a dense wet layer if added in wads. Shred or tear it and mix it through rather than layering.

    Sawdust — yes, but sparingly and only untreated. Very high carbon, so a little goes a long way, and it compacts badly in quantity. A few handfuls mixed through, not a bucketful. Never from treated or painted wood.

    Other things you almost certainly have: egg boxes, kitchen roll tubes, paper bags, the inner tubes from wrapping paper, dry stems from anything you cut back in autumn, and untreated wood shavings from a pet.

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  • @ratio_by_feel · 2h ago
    @ratio_by_feel ·

    To dig out of the current state, treat it as two problems, because wet and sour is not only a carbon shortage.

    It has gone anaerobic. The sour smell is what happens when there is no air, and adding carbon without adding air fixes half of it. So the actual repair is to turn it and mix carbon through as you go, not to layer cardboard on top. Empty it out if you can, and rebuild it mixing torn cardboard through every few forkfuls.

    It is too wet. A pile should feel like a wrung-out sponge — damp, not dripping. If you squeeze a handful and water runs out, you need dry material and you need to keep rain off it. A lid or a sheet of something over an open bin makes a large difference in winter and costs nothing.

    On ratios: the numbers people quote are for building a hot pile from scratch in one go. For a bin fed weekly, the useful version is by feel — if it smells sour, it wants more carbon and more air; if it is dry and nothing is happening, it wants more green and more water. That is the whole control loop and it is more reliable than measuring.

    Winter also simply slows everything down. A cold pile in February that is damp and not smelling is fine and does not need rescuing; it will restart in spring. It is the smell you are fixing, not the speed.

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