Successful Composting For Your Garden

To build and maintain a successful composting regime carries many benefits; to the individual, and to the world at large.

For the individual homeowner or gardener, it’s a method to recycle yard waste and other biodegradable garbage a household produces, while at the same time helps to enrich the garden soil. For the world at large, it reduces the wastes in our landfills and enriches the soil, effecting the final look of your landscape.

You will need to find a location for your compost, and decide whether you want an indoor or outdoors one. Both forms can be successful as long as you follow the basic principles.

For Outdoor Composting

You can either purchase a ready made composting bin; there are many different types with different advantages. Another alternative is to build one you; it doesn’t have to be fancy, just something with three sides and a roof to keep it from getting overly soggy from rain.

For indoor composting, a small bucket will do, preferably with a lid to help keep odors down.

What can be composted successfully?

· All vegetable and fruit peelings and cores, uncooked

· Egg shells

· Grass clippings

· Coffee grounds and tea bags

· Weeds can be composted, but you’ll want to consider whether or not you want to risk the weed seeds being in your compost. If not, compost the plant but not the seed heads.

· Soft pruning from the yard, dead flowers, spent container gardens

· If you have caged animals, you can compost the bedding when changing their cages

· Occasionally, farm manure from rabbits (rabbit is the best), horse, chickens

Items that shouldn’t be composted:

All forms of meats and breads and other cooked foods

Plastics

Dog or cat fecal matter

Branches and other very woody material

Adding red worms to your composting bins can be a great benefit in both speeding up composting times and delivering higher quality compost to the garden. Plus you’ll be introducing more worms to your garden soil and they do much to improve soils structure.

For the very ambitious (kid or adult), a home based business can be developed on how to begin a worm farm, both to gardeners to improve their soil conditions and to fishermen as bait, or supply stores with worms who sell to fishermen.

Compost varies in time to complete anywhere from 3 months to 1 year. It helps to not let it get overly wet, or overly dry. Try to turn and aerate the compost pile once a month or so as this helps it decompose faster.

When ready to use in a garden, it can either be spread out and tilled under the soil with a rototiller, or piled around and in between plants as mulch. Compost can also be added to container gardens as well.