So you have got a vegetable or flower garden and you already figured out the hard way that NOT everything can be bought from the super market in order to maintain your garden. Compost made at home is pretty much a necessity to grow your produce in an organic way while caring for the environment.
Making compost at home is not difficult if you get yourself organized a bit and willing to dispose the right kind of kitchen waste, animal-poultry manure, leaves and grass into a suitable compost area or bin.
Nitrogen & Carbon rich compost ingredients
The essence of organic composting is to supply your plants with the nourishment that they require – which is primarily nitrogen and carbon etc. The following are the garbage items that contain a lot of Nitrogen and carbon in them which means they are good for making compost.
Fruit & vegetable scraps, grass clippings, garden weeds, green comfrey leaves, chicken manure, tea leaves and coffee grounds are excellent sources of Nitrogen.
Old cardboards, paper (except glossy ones), leaves, wood ash, old newsprint, wood chips etc are good source of Carbon.
Good compost would have more Carbon than Nitrogen. 2:1 ratio is recommended between Carbon and Nitrogen which means more brown waste (cardboards, twigs, dry leaves) than green material.
Note: Never compost meat, bones and cooked food
How to Make Compost?
You may follow the following steps to make compost at home. Please note that you may need it all around the year and hence making it in two or three batches might help the cause.
- Find a suitable flat ground in your garden or backyard where the compost pile needs to be set up. It should be typically a place where grass isn’t there and wouldn’t easily be swept away by rain or wind
- Lay twigs, straws or heavy weeds first. This helps with aerating the compost pile as well as providing adequate drainage in case of mild rains
- Layer the compost material in such as way that wet materials such as kitchen waste or animal manure and dry material such as paper and cardboard are in alternate layers
- Add manure such as wheatgrass or clover to activate the pile and expedite the process
- Sprinkle water occasionally – a couple of times a day – to build it up
- Cover it with a plastic sheet or old mat as the heat and steam generated within will make the perfect compost
- Turn the compost around every week with a shovel as this helps to aerate the pile
Your compost will be done in about two months. You know it is ready when there’s no more heat felt whenever you remove the cover and when the ingredients are beyond recognition. Good quality compost will have a dark brown color, easily crushed and highly aerated.
Alternatively you can also use compost tumblers or bins to save space and prevent dirt from spreading around in your garden.
Check out these affordable compost tumblers which suits most garden needs.