You've never truly experienced compost until you've stuck your hands into a towering hot pile and felt its warmth. People can tell you about mesophilic and thermophilic phases until the nematodes live to 100, but feeling it is another blog post altogether.

The particular pile of which I speak was a very large mound of mushroom compost on the grounds of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where our Master Composter class is held. Our teachers Joshua and Karla were giving our merry band of dirt-diggers a tour of essential composting sites throughout the BBG lair. Like the mythical dragon in adventurers' tales of yore, the pile of mushroom compost sat in a distant eddy of the garden, past a cast-iron gate.

Touch this slumbering dragon, of course, and its fiery belly is palpable. The air temperature that particular day was cool, and the outside of the ‘shroom CT was tepid, too; when I dug into it a bit, a steaming mist rose from the beast. I burrowed in further: As cozy as I'd ever been warming my hands at a campfire. When one of my colleagues took a temperature reading with a special thermometer (a handy and essential tool for anyone setting up an outdoor bin), the dial turned to a whopping 120°F. Forgive me if I sound like a city boy gone hayseed, but I simply cannot get over my fascination with this phenomenon: an ordinary-looking pile of dirt with a tropical body temp.

The next location we visited—the BBG's composting-in-your-backyard demonstration site—was less steamy, perhaps, but no less nutritious. In this area, the Garden has a couple of bins set up to explain composting and to showcase the kind of compost bins available. A few tips for you aspiring backyard composters: The kind of bin you select depends on the amount of space you have and the amount of waste you're producing.

A two-bin system made of cedar, the construction for which is detailed in the book Easy Compost—which I highly recommend to all you potential ‘posters—can handle a substantial quantity of material; it's probably the most convenient in terms of being able to turn the pile, which you'll need to do to keep that thermophilic, high-temperature phase of decomposition doing its magic on your raw materials. The prize-winning implement for turning your backyard pile, by the way, is the compost crank, a clever tool that uses a corkscrew design to rotate materials up and down.

For folks looking for pre-fab, small-footprint bins for tight spaces, the demo site shows the Earth Machine, the Garden Gourmet, and BioStack; our instructors have had found the Gourmet to be the most convenient. The top allows you access enough to turn the pile, and the GG also has a door at the bottom so you can harvest the humus (BioStack doesn't).

Quirky composting fact of the day: Queens composters prefer the Earth Machine, while foodie Brooklynites have a yen for the Garden Gourmet.