[habitat_gardener]

You're doing fine. I don't turn my compost, and in the summer it's done in less than 3 months. I add kitchen and garden waste, water it as needed (so that it's as moist as a wrung-out sponge), and add a layer of dry material once in a while.

Once or twice I've had a pile that was too wet, so I turned it, adding mulchy material or shredded newspaper as I went.

I haven't used grass clippings, but one of the cautions is to mix it with other materials rather than creating a thick layer of just grass.

When my compost is "done," it's still not ready to use. Since I use some woody materials in the pile (branches, peach pits, avocado pits, various woody stems of garden plants), it takes more than one cycle for them to break down. So I sift it before using it. I use a garden flat (the black plastic thing with holes an inch apart or less). Or you can tack hardware cloth to a frame. For general garden use, I don't try to pick out the pieces that fall through the 1-inch holes. If I'm using it for seedlings, I sift it with a finer screen. It doesn't have to take a lot of time.

As for how much to use: when I was making lots of compost and had only one garden, I used as much as one 5-gallon container of compost per tomato plant at planting time. But recently I've read a couple books on soil building that recommend no more than one-sixth of an inch of compost per year or less! It depends on your soil and what you want to grow. I've also used my own compost to pot up seedlings. It holds a little more water than is optimal, so now I mix it with potting mix if I have it. It doesn't work for starting most seeds because my pile doesn't get hot enough to kill existing seeds, so I can't tell if a tomato sprout is what I planted or what was in my compost. I still use it for large seeds such as beans, though.