Is this a real manual, or another book about saving the planet?
There is nothing in it about saving the planet. It is materials lists, bin builds, ratios, temperatures, and the specific order to do things in. Where a method costs money I say what it costs. Where it does not work I say so, and every chapter ends with The Limits, which is where I tell you what the method will not do. Treat every number in the book, mine included, as the centre of a range rather than a setting on a machine.
Your videos are free — why would I buy this?
A video has to end, and it has to be about one thing. The manual is all ninety chapters in the order a pile actually happens, with the reasoning underneath each one and The Limits at the foot of every chapter. The chapters also lean on each other, which a playlist cannot do: almost every problem in Part Five traces back to the browns-and-greens balance in Chapter 3 or the moisture test in Chapter 5, and the book points you back by number every time.
Why only $27?
Because the material this book is about is free and already in your yard, and it would be a strange thing to put an expensive book in front of it. $27 is the launch price against $47. It is less than two bags of the soil you are currently buying, and a great deal less than a season of paying somebody to haul away the leaves that would have made it.
What format is it, and how do I get it?
A single illustrated PDF, 137 pages, delivered by Gumroad the moment you pay. It opens on a phone, a tablet or a laptop, and the Quick Reference card and glossary are laid out as pages you can print and pin up in the shed. No app, no login to remember, no subscription.
My pile has never heated up. Does the book actually fix that?
It is the first thing it does. A pile that will not heat is not broken — it is a pile where the workforce cannot eat, and there are only four reasons for that: nothing worth eating, no water, no air, or too small a crowd to keep warm. Chapter 59 walks the diagnosis in order, and Chapters 62, 63 and 53 take the three commonest versions of it apart. The fix is almost always free.
I do not have room for a three-foot pile. Is this any use to me?
Yes. Part Six is the systems that need no heap at all: worm bins for about twenty dollars, bokashi, trench and sheet composting, leaf mold, and a chapter on composting in an apartment. Part Two also covers the small-footprint builds — the trash can composter, the wire ring, the in-ground pit, the buried bucket. What you give up in a small system is speed and heat, and the book is straight with you about that instead of pretending otherwise.
Does it cover the things that go wrong — smells, flies, rats?
Fourteen chapters of Part Five are nothing else. Ammonia, rotten eggs, too wet, bone dry, grass mats, fruit flies, rats and mice, raccoons, dogs and bears, white fuzz and strange growths, weeds sprouting in the pile and then in the beds. Each one starts from what the symptom is telling you about the dial that is off, because the smell is the diagnosis rather than the problem.
