If you’ve been thinking about recycling all of that yard waste into compost, now’s the time to get busy.
You’ll have plenty of prime ingredients coming up shortly in the form of falling leaves, year-end grass clips, and cut/yanked plants once frost ends the growing season.
Besides, why pay to get rid of yard waste, kitchen scraps, shredded paper, and other household organic waste when you could turn it into superb (and free) soil?
That’s the idea of composting — improving your lousy soil while recycling and saving money at the same time.
This isn’t as hard or as messy as you might think. Nature does it all the time without bins or instruction manuals.
Here’s a game plan:
Compost happens
You’ll need no special skills or secrets. Given enough time, all vegetation will break down into decayed fragments called compost.
This can be as simple as: 1.) pile it up; and 2.) wait a year for it to rot.
There are ways, however, to speed up the process and make sure you don’t run into smells or pests.
The pile
One speed-it-up key is stacking enough organic matter to get the pile cooking. A good minimum is three feet tall, wide, and deep.
You can go up to five feet tall, but beyond that, turn the pile regularly or start a series of three-foot piles, which also helps provide finished compost at different times.
The materials
Most important is having a mix of high-nitrogen and high-carbon materials, which is easy to determine because nitrogen-rich materials are generally green and damp while carbon-rich materials are generally brown and dry.
Good “greens” include grass clippings, kitchen peelings, spent plants, and even weeds that haven’t gone to seed. Coffee grounds and manures are high in nitrogen, too, even though they’re not green.
Good “browns” are dried leaves, chipped branches, newspaper, straw, paper from the shredder, and sawdust.
A good mix is about twice as many browns as greens (or at least half and half).
What not to add
Skip meat, bones, fats and dairy products, which although are organic, are most likely to draw animals and create a smell.
Also avoid diseased, bug-ridden and chemically treated plants as well as weeds that have gone to seed since your pile might not get hot enough to kill these threats.
And skip manures from meat-eating animals (dogs and cats included), especially if you’re using the compost on vegetables.
Bin or no bin?
You don’t need an expensive composting drum or really any kind of bin at all. A bin just contains the material and keeps it from blowing around.
Plastic bins with doors are sold commercially, or you can make your own containment out of scrap lumber, used wooden pallets, stacked concrete blocks, chicken wire wrapped around stakes, or even big plastic garbage cans with holes drilled in them for air flow.
Fast cooking
Start with small particles to speed up the process from about a year to three to six months. Shredded leaves and shredded paper, for example, will decompose much faster than whole ones.
A second speedup is making sure the pile stays slightly damp at all times. If it’s not, sprinkle it with a hose.
A third aid is tossing in a few shovelfuls of soil or finished compost with each layer of green and brown materials to supply natural organisms that aid in breakdown.
And fourth, if you turn the pile every few weeks, that’ll ensure enough oxygen to decompose the waste while keeping it well mixed.
Compost is ready when it’s dark and crumbly. This wheelbarrow full has also been sifted to make the compost even finer.George WeigelWhen is it ready?
Finished compost will be black and crumbly and have an “earthy” smell to it.
You may find that material at the bottom and toward the center of the pile is finished before the top and sides, especially if you haven’t turned the pile.
It’s fine to use a fork to flip off the semi-composted or uncomposted material to get to the finished “gardener’s gold” underneath.
Use the not-yet-ready material to start a new pile.
What to do with compost
You’ll probably run out of compost before you run out of uses for it.
Compost is excellent for working into loosened existing soil before planting a new bed, and it’s ideal for “top-dressing” a quarter-inch layer over the lawn.
Layer an inch of compost over the vegetable garden once everything’s pulled for the year, and save a few bags to mix with potting soil for your container plants next year.
What can go wrong?
If you have a pile that’s way too high in browns, the pile will just sit. Mix in some greens to “fuel” it with nitrogen.
If the pile is slimy-looking and smells like stinky methane, it’s likely too high in greens. Mix in more browns.
If you’re seeing unwanted rodents, birds or bugs, cover the pile or use an enclosed bin. Or bury attractive food scraps in the pile with leaves, grass, or pulled plants on top.
Read George’s column on how to become a well composted gardener
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