First I peel off the barely-rotted outer four or five inches from
the old pile; this makes the base of the new one. Untangling the
long stringy grasses, seed stalks, and Brussels sprout stems from
the rest can make me sweat and even curse, but fortunately I must
stop occasionally to spray water where the material remains dry and
catch my wind. Then, I rearrange the rest so half-decomposed
brassica stumps and other big chunks are placed in the center where
the pile will become the hottest and decomposition will proceed most
rapidly. As I reform the material, here and there I lightly sprinkle
a bit of soil shoveled up from around the original pile. When I've
finished turning it, the new heap is about five feet high, six feet
across at the bottom, and about eight feet long. The outside is then
covered with a thin layer of crumbly, black soil scraped up where
the pile had originally stood before I turned it.

Using hand tools for most kinds of garden work, like weeding,
cultivating, tilling, and turning compost heaps is not as difficult
or nearly as time consuming as most people think if one has the
proper, sharp tools. Unfortunately, the knowledge of how to use hand
tools has largely disappeared. No one has a farm-bred grandfather to
show them how easy it is to use a sharp shovel or how impossibly
hard it can be to drive a dull one into the soil. Similarly, weeding
with a _sharp_ hoe is effortless and fast. But most new hoes are
sold without even a proper bevel ground into the blade, much less
with an edge that has been carefully honed. So after working with
dull shovels and hoes, many home food growers mistakenly conclude
that cultivation is not possible without using a rotary tiller for
both tillage and weeding between rows. But instead of an expensive
gasoline-powered machine all they really needed was a little