Composting is a fantastic way to recycle your kitchen waste and improve your soil.  Anything organic can go into your compost, except for meat scraps, diseased plants and pet waste. You can create your own special formulas that yield the best tomatoes or sweetest carrots.  Compost is often referred to as “black gold” and is revered by avid gardeners.

Composting Method

Composting is easier than most people image.  There are even special bins available online or in your local garden store for easy aeration or storage.  The old fashion way is to create a pile in your backyard, or in a large wire cage.  Yet there are alternatives if you want the compost out of site.

Don’t add too much of any one ingredient.  The secret to good compost is the variety of materials that you use.  The mixture should be a blend of autumn leaves (preferably not maple leaves since unless put through a shredder, decompose slowly), grass clippings, wood chips (untreated), pine needles, and shredded newspaper.  You also want to add nitrogen rich materials for nice green leafy plants, such as harvested vegetable plants, kitchen waste, weeds, manures, and soil.

Unless you have a shredder handy, the best method is the sandwich method.  You layer compost ingredients until they are piled 4 to 5 feet high.  Turn over the pile once or twice and it will decompose in 3 months.  Otherwise, the pile will take 6 months to decompose.  Make the pile a convenient size to manage.  You can use cinder block or chicken wire to encase the pile.  The pile should be on level ground.

First put down twig materials.  Then, if available, pile on 6 inches of plant material.  Use 2/3 carbonaceous materials (straw, leaves, wood chips, pine needles, shredded newspaper, etc) and 1/3 nitrogenous material (old harvested vegetable plants, grass, kitchen waste, weeds, manures, etc).  The goal is a good mix of carbon and nitrogen in your compost.  Add a light sprinkling of manure, blood meal, or cottonseed meal.  Then add about an inch of soil.  Spray water on each layer until damp.  Continue until the pile is 4 or 5 feet high and turn it twice in the following three months.  It’s just that easy!

Any compost is ready for use when it smells earthy and is a rich brown.  Add your compost to your plots in layers of 2 to 3 inches, and then rake the compost in.  Make sure to use all your compost.  It will disappear over time.  When added consistently to your soil year after year, your garden will be the envy of the neighborhood.  Compost also encourages earthworms which are great for soil aeration and increasing nutrient availability to plants. 

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.

Powered by AkoComment 2.0!