Composting - Gold for your Garden

How to make this nutrient rich supplement for your garden.

Do you ever experience preparing a wonderful nutritious meal for your family/kids and they eat literally nothing of it or leave half eaten bits and pieces on their plates that you now can’t even safe for tomorrows left over meal? You feel bad about opening the already overfull trashcan just to shuffle all those leftovers into it. Isn’t there a better way of dealing with this situation (since not even the speech of “other kids would be happy to even have a meal” is leaving any impressions at this point). I can give you one word that might solve your problem and at least put your mind at ease that your food scraps aren’t just going to waste: COMPOST.

Compost is a simple and easy way to add nutrient-rich “food” to your garden or lawn and you have most likely tons of those food scraps that are perfect to use for creating your own “food” for your outdoor plants.

What exactly are the benefits of having your own compost area?
Compost is also referred to as the “black gold” and that for a very good reason. You can divert around 30% of your kitchen garbage can into this useful process. That is excellent news to us and our overfull garbage bags since once the organic matter hits the landfill it lacks air which is necessary to decompose quickly. Instead it creates harmful gasses which only supply global warming and climate change (Yes if we all would do a small amount of composting we could actually really say we help safe the planet).

Now lets get down to business..how do we compost in a safe and proper manner that doesn’t look like bunch of half chewed food is thrown all over our backyard?
First of we need to understand what to compost and the ratio of each material.
Carbon-rich matter (tree branches, dried leaves, wood chips, coffee filters, egg shells, wood ash etc.) makes the compost light and keeps nitrogen/ protein rich matter from piling on top of each other. A good healthy compost pile should have more carbon than nitrogen, to keep the nitrogen heavy food scraps from being too dense without enough air flow, causing a slow composting and smelly mess.

Here are the steps:
Start your first compost pile on bare ground which allows worms and beneficial organism to aerate the pile and be transported to your garden beds.

First lay some thin twigs criss cross on the ground which again is another way of supplying air to the compost pile and also adds drainage to the area if rain occurs.
Now add the compost materials in layers, alternating dry materials (twigs, leaves sawdust, wood ashes etc) and moist materials (food scraps, tea bags etc)
Add manure, green manure like clover, wheatgrass etc or any nitrogen source to speed up the composting process.
This one seems odd first but is a necessary step: Keep the compost moist.
Cover the area with anything you might have, wood, carpet scraps etc. Covering the pile helps retain moisture and heat which is your secret recipe to successful composting.
Last but not least: Turn the pile every few weeks with a pitchfork or shovel.

Once your first composting pile is accomplished add new materials by mixing them in rather than layering on top of the pile and keep turning the pile.
You can also always purchase or build a composter if that seems more appealing than building your pile on the ground itself.

Here are a few ideas for composter that might suit your backyard space: