With spring on the way it is time to start thinking about gardening and growing food. So if you want to grow food naturally (you do), it is also time to start thinking about composting as early as possible. I want to help everyone try to start composting no matter what their situation. As the title says, yes you can compost, it doesn't matter where you live, what area, or whether you are in an apartment or on a farm.
I want to start a little ongoing series to delve into composting, unpack the techniques and science, and work on a few recipes to make home composting available to everyone. Over the next few weeks we will look at various methods of composting and how to make them fit into our everyday lives.
Compost is defined as decayed plant matter: a mixture of decayed plants and other organic matter used by gardeners for enriching soil. This is kind of the most basic description. If you have space, time, and a bunch of things that used to be alive, you can pile them up and wait. After 1-2 years you will have compost which you can use to amend soil and feed your plants. This is the easiest method and slowest. I highly recommend this method, if, as I said, you have time and space.
In all forms of composting the ingredients matter. In the "pile it up and wait" method, what you put in the pile matters least. Literally if it used to be alive, it will compost. Dead plants from the garden, grass clippings, fall leaves, kitchen scraps, neighbors pets that bark all night, manure, wood mulch, coffee grounds etc. It will all decay and make the best fertilizer for your garden. Certain things like wood mulch will take a long time, 2-3 years, to break down, as opposed to shredded leaves which should be done within a year. The bottom layer of the pile where it contacts the soil will always be the first part to finish. This is because nature has a sick sense of humor and wants to watch you dig through a pile of smelly rotting manure to get a small bucket of finished compost which will only be enough to put around one tomato plant. However, there are other methods which are in effect like walking up behind nature and dropping a piece of ice in her shorts. (I warned you about the jokes.)
If you choose to use this method I recommend doing it intelligently and using a proven process. First take the time to accumulate ingredients in the proper amounts. You want a 30 to 1 carbon to nitrogen ratio (C:N) by weight. Carbon, or brown, ingredients include wood mulch, leaves, straw, dry brown grass clippings, sawdust. These would be considered almost pure carbon. Nitrogen ingredients include but are not limited to, fresh grass, coffee grounds, blood (seriously), veggie scraps, and manure. In the absence of the ability to weigh large amounts of these things I use a rough estimate by volume. Try to avoid large pieces of anything. The smaller the pieces the faster and more thoroughly they will break down. For this slow method the best mix is shredded fall leaves and coffee grounds. The next best is shredded leaves and grass clippings. This is the easiest to collect by mowing your (untreated) lawn in the fall and collecting the mix with a grass catcher. But again, if you just pile everything up, regardless of the ratio and ingredients, time, bacteria, and fungus will give you compost. This is the best method for really large amounts that you can't efficiently work with. Unless of course you happen to have a tractor with a bucket loader. In which case I want to be your friend.
This is also the very basic composting method that we will build on in the future.
Until then,
Keep on keepin on!
JB
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