When it comes to composting the remnants of your vegetable garden – the long tomato vines, the lengths of bean vines and similar items, the easiest solution is to just toss them whole in the compost pile.

That mess ‘o vines, however, will be difficult to turn and slow to decompose. With a few minutes more, there are better ways.

The first thing I like to do is, starting a few weeks before I’m likely to take down the tomatoes, start getting the compost pile hot. No surprise to people who have been reading for a while that means using used coffee grounds from Starbucks.

The hot compost does a few things:

1. A hot compost is hot due to a high level of bacterial activity. That bacteria is gobbling up the material, which means it will decompose (and settle) faster.
2. Hot compost will also kill off most diseases. The broad-brush, not 100% accurate rule of thumb is that three days at or above 140° F will kill off most diseases. Important to note that if the center of your pile is 140° then the outer edges will be less, but you probably already know that.

The other thing of course is that 10′ long tomato vines, tangled with itself, other vines and all the other material in your compost, aren’t going to be easy to turn. Also, material cut into smaller pieces will decompose faster. (This is one reason that shredding leaves produces compost faster.)

Each fall I usually have a 20′ wall of 7′ long tomato vines, in addition to a 5′-10′ wall of beans, as well as other material. If I just ‘pull and toss’ those vines, I’ll regret it when it comes time to turn the compost pile.

You can help the process by cutting the vines into pieces a few different ways.

1. I still prefer the simplest method – a pair of clippers. I’m not dicing material, I’m just cutting the vines into pieces 6″-12″ long.
2. You could use a leaf shredder, but in my experience the material mostly gets pushed to the sides where it doesn’t get cut, jams, and you spend more time than using a clipper. I tried it once, for just a few minutes before giving up.
3. You could run it over with a power mower. This is probably the fastest option, but I expect you’d get a fair amount of vines tangled around the spindle. If you’ve tried this, please chime in in the comments!
4. You could toss all the vines in a trash barrel and attack it with a string trimmer. Wear goggles, because I expect you’ll get a lot of flying tomato pieces.

Once you’ve got your material cut down to size, make sure to add carbon-rich material such as leaves. At the same time, I like to add more used coffee grounds. The nitrogen from the coffee grounds are more readily available than the nitrogen from the vines.

Scientifically minded and other observant people will note that by adding more coffee I am throwing the carbon:nitrogen balance out of whack, and you’re right, but there it is.

The tomatoes themselves can take up an entire 1 cu yd compost bin. That needs a lot of leaves or other carbon rich material ready to mix in.

Happy composting!