7 Methods of Highly Effective Composting
High quality organic compost is the best conditioner for your soil – it adds rich nutrients to your plants, it improves the texture of your soil and the ability to retain water, and it helps loosen up clay. Mix a half inch over your lawn every spring and fall, and use on your plants and in your vegetable garden. Best of all, compost is free and you reduce the amount of waste that goes into landfills.
Before we go into the 7 best ways to create compost, you need to know what materials to add.
What Materials Should I Use in the Compost?
Efficient and rich compost is a mixture of "green" (nitrogen-rich) and "brown" (carbon-rich) materials. A 50/50 combination is optimal, though there are no hard rules.
Green materials:
- Grass clippings
- Fruit and vegetable kitchen scraps
- Coffee grounds and filters
- Manure from vegetarian animals (cow, horse, sheep and rabbit)
- Hair
- Tea bags
- Egg shells
Brown materials:
- Old, brown grass, leaves and twigs
- Pet rabbit and hamster bedding (any vegetarian pet bedding)
- Some Sawdust and wood ash
- Very little pure charcoal ash (not too much, as it contains high levels of iron and sulfur)
- straw
- dryer lint
- shredded pine cones
- Shredded, non-glossy newspaper and cardboard
What Should Not Be Used in the Compost Bin?
Avoid:
- Any animal scraps like meat, milk products or fish bones. They will attract animals and make the compost smelly
- Cat or dog droppings, as they may contain disease organisms
- The ash from coal briquettes for barbeques - commercial briquettes are actually a mixture of coal, lighter fluid and other chemicals
- Diseased plants, as they could spread the disease in the soil
- Weeds with well developed roots or seeds, as they could survive and propagate when you use the compost
The 7 Methods of Highly Effective Composting
There are a variety of ways to effectively turn your organic matter into nutrient-rich, earthy compost - black gold, as some gardeners term it. Follow these tips, and you’ll end up with beautiful, healthy and rich compost for your lawn and garden in about a month or less:
- Proper ratio of browns to greens - Make sure you have about a 50/50 mix of brown to green materials, or slightly more browns. Brown material is the energy needed for microbes to thrive, and green material is the protein. Build the materials up by layers - some green, then some brown. (As a side note, you might hear of a 30:1 carbon to nitrogen ratio. Don’t worry about this, because all green materials are also mainly carbon, so a 50/50 mix closely achieves this ratio.)
- Water It - Not too little, not too much, but just right - Keep the compost moist (but not sopping wet). Basically, as moist as a wrung-out sponge. If the compost dries out, decomposition will stop. Too wet, and it will begin to smell.
- Aeration - Turning your compost with a pitch fork or other garden tool will make the material decompose faster. This is because the microbes who are busy chewing away at your pile need oxygen, so the more you give them, the healthier they will be, and the faster the process becomes. This is why compost tumblers
are so effective. You are constantly letting air into the pile.
- Warmth - In a northern climate with cold winters, microbial activity will nearly stop. In the summer, they are alive, reproducing like crazy, and eating! All that activity also generates internal heat, so much heat that with optimum conditions, the center of your pile can reach in excess of 135 degrees F. Achieving this heat is rare, but if it is consistent over 3 or 4 days, it will destroy pathogens and weed seeds. Use a compost thermometer
to see how well your compost is doing. Do not disturb the pile, but if the temperature peaks and starts to fall, aerate and turn the pile to let more oxygen in.
- Pile size - Compost bins should be small enough to aerate properly, but also large enough to maintain internal heat. Minimum dimensions should be 3 ft by 3 ft by 3 ft.
- Vermicomposting - To increase the decomposition process even further, add some red wriggler worms to the top of your compost. These critters love a large volume of organic material, and will happily reside in the first six inches of your pile. These worms are not your regular soil earthworms, who prefer deep burrows. Red wrigglers mainly reside on farms in manure piles or other rich sources of organic matter. You can easily buy them in garden shops or even online.
- Size of organic materials - The smaller the organic pieces you place in your compost, the less surface area it will have and the faster it will decompose. A good guideline is to add materials no larger than 2 or 3 inches. Chop up your melon rinds and shred your roots, bark and newspaper. Also, avoid clumping, such as what happens with grass clippings. Mix your grass with dry leaves or shredded newsprint first.
Happy composting!
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