Start your compost pile when you have lots of weeds, tall grass, and other trimmings on your property. Its best to have a good mix of dry material such as twigs, sticks, straw, leaves, or corn stalks and green martial such as fresh weeds pulled up root and all, grass clippings, trimmings from herbs or existing vegetables or other green plants. Additionally, kitchen scraps go into the compost pile, especially egg shells, tea bags, coffee grounds, cooking scraps and trimmings, even bones go in there. Some things like this you can burn first and then add the ashes to the pile. Which reminds me, I cleaned out our outdoor fire pit and added those ashes to the pile.
Water is a very important ingredient for a healthy compost pile.
Start building your compost pile. I like to really chop up woody material because it takes so long to decompose and making the pieces small gives more surface area for the decomposition process to work. The larger twigs and sticks also provide an air pocket within your pile. Air is another important ingredient to healthy composting. This is the smaller twigs and cuttings, dry grass, straw, or even a couple of bags of steer manure, or fresh green manure if you can get your hands on it.