The Top 7 Compost Time Lapse Videos

Like everyone on the internet knows, you don’t do a top list with a round number. A weird odd number indicates a true curatorial selection based on stringent criteria, unpadded to reach some arbitrary numerical milestone. That is certainly the case here, with this definitive list compiled over several weeks by the large and powerful Composting staff who screened and rated hundreds of thousands of videos to find these, the most compelling examples of the compost time lapse genre beloved by, well, several people, probably. Let us begin.

Watching a the top of a compost pile marginally change over the course of several days is soothing in the way steady boredom soothes, like watching paint dry, but faster. The strobing of the sun rising and setting, ivy fast-quivering in the wind—just set this on loop and cue up some Vangelis instead of the synth pop track that comes with the video, and you’ll be out in no time. 5/10 for old school internet DIY somnambulist charm.

Someone put a lot of work into this one, collecting closeups and miniature narratives from little scenes in various parts of a compost situation involving plants, roots, insects, worms, and more. The opening banger “Birth of Hundreds of Pillbugs” is hard to beat. 6/10 for effort invested in the editing.

From the macro to the micro, what if you just zoomed way in one a single blueberry, and shot a ton of frames over a week? Much better sound track for this one too, very chill. 7/10 for nice focus and the little transparent worm chorus.

Here’s an attempt to illustrate how one company’s compostable packaging decays in soil, which I’m not sure I find credible. Looks like it sort of just got gradually buried? But maybe I’m just being cynical. 2/10 for unpersuasive commercial rhetoric.

The majority of compost time lapse videos online are really about vermicomposting, or the joys of watching lightning-fast swarming worms devour everything from cucumbers to chicken heads in seconds. Here’s a whole multi-layer worm buffet. 10/10 for aesthetically pleasing bin arrangement.

But what if you fed your worms ONLY CARDBOARD?!? Why. Why would you do that to your worms. I guess they don’t care though, worms don’t know any better, but you do. You know they would like to eat a banana peel, if only they had a brain to conceive the desire. 7/10 for grudgingly admitted success even if I feel bad for the worms.

Of course it could be worse, you could just feed your worms a bunch of kale, in which case they just god damn die en masse. Nice job. Cardboard doesn’t seem so bad now does it. 0/10 for mass salad vermicide.

Today is my mother’s birthday. Carolynn Bradley Mohney passed away in December 2019, right before the pandemic. Here she is in 1943, in rural Ohio, posing in formal dress with a chicken placed top her head by Cousin Jimmy, seen running out of frame to the left. Happy birthday mom.