Composting is an environmentally friendly way to reduce the amount of trash your home produces.
If you're a gardener looking to stretch the gardening budget or live a more green lifestyle, you'll find that creating your own fertilizer through composting can be a rewarding and easy experience. Many options are available to get started, including commercial compost bins and a variety of ways to create your own composting system. For best results, check with your local municipality and cooperative extension office for advice specific to your area's regulations. Does this Spark an idea?
Instructions
1. Set up your compost bin in a mostly sunny area near your garden. Commercial products can range in price depending on style and design. A number of build-your-own projects can be found online or at your local cooperative extension office and range from elaborate tumbling devices to simple chicken wire enclosures. If you are building your own, check with your local municipality to make sure it fits the regulations as far as coverings, size or other issues. Some areas, for example, may only allow yard waste to be composted for fear of bringing in pests, such as skunks, to bins without lids.
2. Layer the bottom of your bin with twigs and sticks. These break down slowly and allow for some drainage run-off without impeding the worms and insects that help with the decomposition process.
3. Place a layer of leaves, a couple inches thick, on top of the twigs and sticks. Brown matter like leaves are high in carbon and take longer to break down on their own. Worms and other beneficial creatures use this layer as bedding if they are drawn through to the upper layers where their desired foods are found, thus, breaking down the leaves more quickly.
4. Layer green matter on top of the brown. Green materials such as veggie and fruit scraps, coffee grinds and green, non-diseased yard waste and grass clippings are all high in nitrogen and break down more quickly. Green matter turns your compost into a living environment because of the microbes, bugs and worms at work breaking everything down into a soil-like consistency that is high in nutrients.
5. Continue to layer alternate layers of brown and green matter as much as possible to keep the mixture even. Too much green matter will result in a moldy mush and too little green matter will take a long time to break down.
6. Add water regularly to keep the pile moist.
7. Turn with a garden fork every couple of weeks to move the outer materials into the center where the heat builds up and decomposition occurs.
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