My pile now sits, Buddha-like, in the backyard.

Over the past two months, I’ve made a dozen or so roundups of leaves, topping each new load on my pile with layers of grass clippings, seaweed, kitchen scraps, rabbit litter, coffee grounds and whatever other ready-to-rot organic filler I come across.

After all those additions, each followed by a fresh exhalation of air, my pile has assumed its winter repose. Its bulk seems permanent, immutable save for the tendrils of steamy vapor that waft up from its mounded summit on cold mornings.

I know underneath its mantle of damp brown leaves and flecks of seaweed, my pile is stewing. Left to its own devices, it will slowly cook, a crockpot of compost, through the winter.

But as they say, a watched pot never boils, and I can’t resist tinkering with my pile’s inner workings to stoke the process of turning its raw ingredients into a finished product of a new living soil called humus.

Over the winter, I’ll continue with my regular deposits of kitchen scraps and such. I carve out a hole in the pile with a pitchfork, upend a container of slop into the mix, then backfill the hole with a plug of leaves raked up from a corner of the yard.

These contributions are helpful, mostly for housekeeping, but only scratch the surface of my pile. And fully turning my pile with a pitchfork will have to wait until the spring, after my pile has had the still time of winter to cook down into a heap that’s more manageable in size.

What my pile needs now right now are big gulps of water and air. Without these essential elements and agents, the chemical process that is decomposition will slowly grind to a halt.

“The amount of water in your compost pile is fairly critical, but you have plenty of leeway in which to work,” writes Stu Campbell in “Let It Rot! — the Gardener’s Guide to Composting” (Storey, 1998). “If the moisture content is much greater than 60 percent, you run the risk of having an anaerobic pile; if it is much less than 40 percent, organic matter will not decompose rapidly enough because the bacteria are deprived of the moisture they need to carry on their metabolism. Of course, you can’t monitor the percentages, so in general try to make sure the materials in your pile have the moisture content of a well-wrung sponge.”

“This is COOKING, not BAKING, and you have a lot of wiggle room,” Mike McGrath fairly shouts in his “Book of Compost” (Sterling Publishing, 2006). “Not bone dry, not soaking wet; in the middle is just right. And if the Goldilocks method doesn’t work for you, purchase a moisture meter — you can get these inexpensive electrical probe devices online and at most garden centers. They’re great to have around if you have a lot of houseplants…”

The rains this fall have been plentiful, and regular. I try to time my yard cleanups in advance of a coming storm; even a modest shower tamps down the leaves atop the pile so they don’t skitter back across the yard when the front blows through. “Rainwater is the best kind to put on compost. It picks up lots of oxygen, minerals and microorganisms as it falls through the air, giving your compost an added boost,” Stu Campbell counsels.

But even the heaviest rain soaks down into my pile only a matter of inches, absorbed by the nearest layer of seaweed and chopped leaf mulch and repelled by the first strata of whole leaves with their waxy coatings.

Through the fall I’ve taken care to add as much moist material to the beginnings of my pile as possible; grass clippings, damp leaves and musty seaweed, and I’ve dampened the lot from time to time with a spritz from the hose. But I know from the vapors rising out of the top that the steam engine that is my pile is boiling off the water it has stored up inside.

My pile is thirsty.

This morning, a Sunday, is dry and warm for December – about 40 degrees. Just warm enough for me to turn on the garden hose and unfurl its stiff coils across the lawn over to my pile.

My pile burns through the water in its midst, even on a cold December day. Time to water it before the winter freeze sets in.

I stick the nozzle of the hose into my pile, jabbing it in as deep as it will intrude.  It’s always a deep mystery where the water goes and what unseen path it follows through the matrix that is my pile. Every minute or so I stub the end of the running hose into another spot underneath the leaves.

I calculate flow rates in my head. If my hose pours out a gallon every 30 seconds, that means eight pounds of liquid will weigh down the pile. But what path is the water taking? What will absorb it?

Usually by the time I can come up with some sort of answer, a trickle of water is wetting my feet at the pile’s edge. My pile needs water, but seems impervious to it. You can lead a hose to a compost heap, but you can’t make my pile take a drink.

I extract the hose and plunge the tip into another section, then another. It’s like dabbing a turkey with a baster, no matter how deep I stick the hose into the voids of my pile, the coursing water seems to find its way out back onto the ground surrounding it. My pile is not the sponge I think it is.

What my pile needs now is air.