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GARDENING COMPOSTING
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g is Easy. YOU JUST NEED TO START. By Gavin Heron of Earth Probotics
Take a deep breath. Relax. Breathe evenly. And say out loud: “compost happens”. There. Don't you feel better? Making your own compost is one of the easiest, fun and beneficial things you can do for your garden. Compost is a natural process where micro and macro organisms break down organic matter and make it available as food for plants. Nature does this all the time; what do you think happens to the leaves in a forest after autumn? They go back to the soil and feed the tree in the spring (basically a natural food larder). Making your own compost is one of the easiest, fun and beneficial things you can do for your garden.
First, why make compost? When you trash your garden and food waste you are throwing away nutrients. Your plants pulled key nutrients from the soil in order to grow. By dumping your organic waste you are, over time, reducing the health of your soil and thus your garden. It is also silly to throw away your garden nutrients and then buy it back from someone (or worse add synthetic short-term fertiliser).
Photo Credit: Freepik
Additionally, when your garden waste is dumped into a landfill it rots and emits dangerous greenhouse gases while leaching pathogens into the water system. Not good! So here are some tips on making great nonsmelly, crumbly, and full of all the good stuff compost. (Trust me, once you start you'll become that weird compost person who is more proud of the dark crumbly stuff than glorious tomatoes). Compost requires a balance between carbon
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and nitrogen rich material. Carbon is woody stuff (or browns). Nitrogen is leafy stuff (or greens). Ideally you should have 2 to 3 times more brown stuff than green stuff. If you have too much brown your compost will be very slow to breakdown as you won't get much heat. If you have too much green then you'll have a smelly slimy heap. (Either way, both will eventually turn back to soil). The challenge is that in summer we have huge amounts of green grass. And in winter an oversupply of brown leaves. We find dealing with an over abundance of brown material easier than dealing with too much green. That's because we're not in a rush and would rather avoid the ammonia (NH3) smells from having too much nitrogen. Also, the brown stuff is easy to store until it is needed (or can also be used, in autumn, make leaf mould). If you’re short of browns in the summer you can simply use cardboard as a brown for your compost (it is after all made from wood). Serviettes, newspaper (not the shiny stuff), paper rolls, cardboard boxes (we always ask the grocer to add our veggies into a cardboard box for precisely this reason) can all be used. Just tear up these inputs into small pieces and add them into your compost with your lawn clippings.
