Learn how to fuel your organic self-sufficient garden to keep growing more food.
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This post is part of a new mini-training series! I’m passionate to help people grow organic food at home and have food security. You can join over 20,000 people who listen to the Homesteading & Gardening In The Suburbs Podcast and listen to this post by clicking play below or read on to learn more.
Why Compost?
To an organic grower, compost is very important. It helps with drainage in heavy soils, it helps to retain moisture in sandy soils or when used as a mulch. It provides nutrients to the plants you grow and can help suppress weeds if used in a mulch thick enough.
How To Make Compost
Making compost is easy and there are many ways to make it; from worm compost to anaerobic bacteria (Bokashi) composting as well as the traditional compost heaps known by gardeners the world wide.
Composting is pretty easy; you collect organic matter and pile it together, turn it to introduce some oxygen to the billions of microorganisms which are turning the waste to gardener’s gold and eventually, everything rots down to be a sweet forest floor smelling dark almost black compost.
It starts by collecting the waste to make compost. Pretty much anything which was once living can be composted. Some examples include cardboard, cotton, food waste, vegetable peelings, grass clippings etc.
Cooked and raw food scraps such as meat, fish, bones etc can be composted but may attract rodents, raccoon or even bears to the compost pile unless they are treated via a hot composting method or Bokashi system
How To Start Collecting Materials For Composting
You can collect the kitchen waste in a small trash, 5 gallon bucket or even an old coffee can! You can even pick up nice ceramic 1 gallon crocks for compost
We include cardboard, newspaper shreds, vacuum waste, fur from grooming the dogs (but not too much, it takes a long time to break down), vegetable peelings, tea bags, coffee grinds etc. We layer the green, nitrogen rich waste with the brown, carbon rich waste throughout the can and take it out to the main composter once full or if something particularly bad smelling (bad broccoli comes to mind) has gone in.
What Materials To Gather
Researching compost and you will hear about greens and browns. To have good compost quickly, you need to have the optimum level of green material to brown which doesn’t normally happen for the average backyard gardener.
But what are greens and browns? These refer to materials high in nitrogen and decompose quickly – the greens and the browns are lower in nitrogen and contain more carbon and take longer to decompose. Usually the brown materials are dry and need to be moistened in the heap.
Fresh Greens
Some green materials you can compost include:
- grass clippings
- dead-headed flowers
- vegetable peelings
- fruit peelings
- manure (chicken, farmyard, even zoo!)
- tea leaves/bags
- coffee grounds
- spent hops and grain from brewing
- comfrey
- kelp/seaweed
Carbon Rich Brown Materials
Some brown materials you can compost include:
- cardboard
- newspaper
- junk mail (there is some conflicting information about the leaching of inks from newspaper and paper based wastes, we don’t compost glossy paper because it takes too long)
- cotton
- fur
- tumble drier lint
- vacuum cleaner waste
- shrub and tree prunings
- chipped/shredded branches and twigs
A diverse mixture of materials in the heap to rot down will help to insure a good mixture of nutrients in the resulting compost.
When I lived on the coast in England I would add washed seaweed to my compost after a storm had washed it up on the beach which added lots of trace minerals to the compost. Some gardeners also add rockdust; to ensure some additional trace minerals are incorporated.
Which Composter
There are many commercial composters
Choose a composter that suits your budget and physical needs, not everyone can get in and turn over the composting materials with a garden fork and rebuild the heap. Tumbling composters offer good protection from pests and handle smaller quantities.
Compost Care Tips
The heap of materials for compost should be moist but not soaking wet all the time. Check if the heap needs some water regularly, if it does then add some. If the heap is too wet, cover it from rain if that is the problem or leave the lid off/open if there is too much water inside.
After adding the materials to the heap leave them for a few days then turn the materials using a pitchfork or a border fork to introduce oxygen to the pile for the microbes. Turn the material from the outside to the inside.
Some related posts:
Why you’ve been composting wrong all along.
Learn More
This post is part of a mini-training series. Click the links below to take you to the next training.
Double Digging and Soil Improvement
Cover Crops
Integrated Pest Management
Training not live yet? Check out some related posts below:
- How Can You Help Keep Seeds Patent Free?
- Tips For A Thriving Seed Bank
- Landrace Gardening
- The Ultimate Guide To Choosing The Right Seeds To Grow In Your Garden
I want to hear from you! Let me know what you are composting! Let me know in the comments or over in the Facebook Group!
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