I Fed My Compost Heap for Two Years and It Never Broke Down

I started my compost heap in the spring of 2022 with good intentions and a bin I picked up at Home Depot for thirty dollars. Every week I added kitchen scraps—coffee grounds, vegetable peelings, eggshells, the usual stuff. By the fall I’d thrown in a few bags of leaves.

Two years later, I could still recognize individual banana peels.

The pile just sat there. When I dug into it with a pitchfork, I’d find intact onion skins from months ago, coffee filters that looked brand new, and leaves that hadn’t broken down into dark, earthy compost like everyone said they would.

Nothing was rotting. Nothing was heating up. The whole bin was a cold, layered museum of everything I’d tossed in.

I wasn’t doing anything obviously wrong—at least not that I could see. The bin had ventilation holes. I turned it every few weeks. I kept adding material.

But something fundamental was missing from the equation. The question was what.

It took a simple thermometer to point me toward the answer.