materials containing calcium are great for the pile. Acidic soil can easily be corrected by adding garden lime (ground limestone), but there is no simple way of making an alkaline soil more acidic. If your compost pile is acidic because of poor aeration, it’s far better to treat the cause rather than attempt to treat the symptoms by adding lime. However, although most green waste contains plenty of calcium, some compost materials are naturally low in calcium. For example, fall leaves of oak and hornbeam are relatively rich—for tree leaves—in nitrogen, yet do not make good compost, which makes sense when you discover that both are low in calcium. Woody waste such as hedge prunings, especially of conifers, is also short of calcium, so here there is a case for adding lime to help it break down. The correlation isn’t perfect, but materials that are high in calcium also tend to be high in nitrogen, and no low-calcium materials contain more than moderate levels of nitrogen.
High in calcium Annual and perennial weeds; brassica leaves and stalks; kitchen vegetable waste; leaves of ash, cherry, elm, hawthorn, linden, maple, and rose; seaweed.
Low in calcium Bark, bracken, and ferns generally; conifer needles; hay and straw; leaves of beech, birch,
hornbeam, and oak; moss; wood.
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