September 2026 - Tom Wade w/ Master Composters Alane Weber & Sammie Bass

Have you had any luck with using pine needles? Or how would you do that?

Yeah, pine needles are great.

So two ways I use them.

When they fall fresh from the tree and everything you see on the ground, so it could be three, four, five years, they don't break down very easily.

And

I like to either leave them for a long time and let them passively begin to break down so they're not just an intact needle.

And the others, if they're brand new, I like to chip and shred them and get them smaller because they'll break down easier.

I use them in small components for my browns or high carbon materials in a compost pile.

Well, you hear that a lot in composting where people will say browns and then they'll say greens.

And so maybe we should go into a little bit about what is that brown?

So the brown is going to be something with a carbon to nitrogen ratio over, what, 60? 60 carbon to one nitrogen.

And...

On the point of pine needles, I love to compost my pine needles.

I have so many pine trees on my property and I just let them fall, collect on the ground.

And then sometimes I'll run over them with my lawnmower.

I

actually just built a compost pile yesterday and I didn't break them down at all.

I just put them right in.

And in a year with my worms, they will completely break down.

It's pretty impressive.

That is impressive because out at Jacobson's, the guys come out there and drop stuff, mostly leaves, and I kept telling them mostly leaves, and they kept dropping mostly pine needles.

And I was saying, hey, that's a lot of pine needles and not that many leaves.

And they were like, okay, and what you're saying is we can break these pine needles down.

They were breaking down a lot slower in the process that I was using.

I have a suggestion for that.