My Middle Georgia sandy soil, compost pile was easy to start and is doing great after five years. My brother-in-law asked me all I did so he could start his, but it has not worked for him. He lives in North Georgia in hard red-clay territory. He did dig down a foot to loosen up the clay, but everything he puts on it just sits on top of the clay. Any suggestions or good articles to help?

Would think that a compost pile would work no matter what surface it is on.

Compost can be, and is, made on top of concrete, so the soil type it sits on is irrelevant. Maybe your BIL's pile is not getting the usual worms and other decomposers from the soil. In that case, they can be bought or brought in from elsewhere and added to the pile. Also, the correct dampness must be maintained, and an imbalanced ratio of "greens" to "browns" can cause very slow breakdown of materials.

dsblackstock said: My Middle Georgia sandy soil, compost pile was easy to start and is doing great after five years. My brother-in-law asked me all I did so he could start his, but it has not worked for him. He lives in North Georgia in hard red-clay territory. He did dig down a foot to loosen up the clay, but everything he puts on it just sits on top of the clay. Any suggestions or good articles to help?

Anything consists of what?

I think patience would be a good thing to practice.
I'm imagining a pile of squash bits, tomato cores, and coffee grounds...

There are any number of articles on hurrying the process... But... little point in doing so.

At my house, plants pulled from the garden, blemished tomatoes, squash vines that have played out... all that stuff goes to the chickens... what they don't eat today, they keep turned until it becomes garden gold.

If your BIL were to toss some garden soil over the compost that he has... Then, he could stop looking at it...

I suspect that the main problem is that the pile is small.

1. Take a bag of your compost from your pile and add it to his. You'll introduce the bacteria that's needed. If you can find some worms, also give some to him.
2. Keep the compost pile moist but don't make the soil inundated.
3. The compost pile should initially be a pile of brown stuff like mulch. When you add kitchen scraps to it, dig a little hole in the brown stuff and bury the kitchen scraps, aka the green stuff. This works very well for me. The green stuff speeds up the decomposing rate of the brown stuff around it. You can put something on the pile to keep the warmth and moisture in.

4. The brown stuff you put into the pile should be chipped into small pieces. If there are a lot of sticks there might be too much space for air and the stuff will be dry all the time and not decompose.

Good luck!