Composting your Waste, Garden Compost
May
14
Between a third and a half of all household waste can be turned into compost for use in the garden rather than put in the rubbish bin to end up in landfill. Anything in your home that eventually decomposes can go into your compost bin or heap.
Banana skins and egg shells, paper and cardboard, vegetable peelings and tea bags – much of the stuff you throw in the bin to be collected by the bin lorry can be composted instead. Avoid meat, fish, newspapers, and cooked food, and make sure no cat and dog dirt, glossy magazines, or disposable nappies get into the mix.
The two key ingredients of compost are carbon and nitrogen. You can find the carbon in your household recycling bin – paper and cardboard for example -and find the nitrogen in your kitchen bin in the form of fruit and vegetable peelings. Add some grass cuttings, manure (farmyard animal or chicken manure with straw in it is best), and weeds (nitrogen-producing materials) to the mix and you’ll eventually have some great compost. Equal proportions of carbon and nitrogen materials give you the best mix.
Chop everything into small pieces so that the composting process can work more quickly and effectively. It takes longer for the material to break down into compost the bigger the pieces are.
Put the whole lot into a composting bin which you can get from your local garden centre, hardware store, or from your local authority – some provide them for free. Otherwise, leave an area of your garden for a composting heap that you can keep adding material to.
The key to a good compost is balance – don’t overdo it with any one ingredient as it will oversupply some of the nutrients, which can sometimes do as much harm as good.
In order for the waste material to turn into compost, it needs air and water:
Keep the festering compost moist to allow the thousands of bacteria and fungi to do their work. If there’s too much moisture the heap will be fairly smelly but if it’s too dry nothing will happen.
Turn the compost over regularly with a garden fork and allow as much oxygen to enter the process as you can. The more often you turn it, the quicker the compost will be ready.
As composting materials rot, they produce heat and micro-organisms that speed up the rotting process. Larger organisms, such as flies, worms, and other insects live in your compost and contribute to the rotting process as well.
Eventually you get broken-down material that looks like dark earth. It can take up to a year for small-scale composting of household material to produce compost you can use in the garden but covering the compost heap with old carpet keeps the heat in and speeds up the composting process.
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