Organic Composting and How To Build Compost Bins
What Is Compost
Do you know what really happens when things rot? Are you afraid that compost making is a nasty, unpleasant, or difficult process? It isn't.
Organic Composting is the decaying of food, mostly vegetables or manure. As raw organic materials are eaten and re-eaten by many, many tiny organisms from bacteria to earthworms, their components are gradually altered and recombined.
A compost pile is actually a fast-track method of changing crude organic materials into something resembling soil, called humus.Humus is brown or black, has a fine, crumbly texture, is very light-weight when dry, and smells like fresh earth. It is sponge-like, holding several times its weight in water. humus attracts plant nutrients like a magnet so they aren't so easily washed away by rain or irrigation. Then humus feeds nutrients back to plants.
Compost making is a simple process. Done properly it becomes a natural part of your gardening or yard maintenance activities, as much so as mowing the lawn. And making compost does not have to take any more effort than bagging up yard waste.
Handling well-made compost can be a pleasant experience. It is easy to ignore compost's offensive origins because there is no similarity between the good-smelling brown or black crumbly substance dug out of a compost pile and the manure, garbage, leaves, grass clippings and other waste products from which it began.
For thousands of years gardeners and farmers had few fertilizers other than animal manure and compost. These were always considered very valuable substances. We changed to using toxic chemicals in our fertilizers, organic wastes were often considered nuisances with little value. These days we are rediscovering compost as an agent of soil improvement and also finding out that we must compost organic waste materials to recycle them in an ecologically sound manner.
How To Make Compost
Ingredients To Use To Make Compost
Compost needs three essential ingredients they are,Green material, Brown material and Sufficient moisture.
Green material is high in nitrogen. It is usually what we refer to as kitchen scraps like coffee grounds, peelings, fruit cores, and eggshells. almost any thing that is not greasy or meaty can be used. Grass clippings, leaves, weeds and Manure from farm animals only are used also.
Brown material is high in carbon. cardboard, Paper, sawdust, dry leaves, small branches and twigs,hay or straw, etc. fall into this category.
Do not add any animal waste, meats, oils, dairy, diseased plants, any types of weeds that have gone to seed, or any plants that have been treated with pesticides or herbicides.
Moisture Without moisture, your compost will take a very long time to do anything, and if to dry it will not break down at all. If too wet, it will start to smell bad and become very slimy. You want to keep it damp at all times, but not soaking wet.
You should keep all ingredients chopped up as small as possible and turn the pile once a week or so to move the material from the outside of the pile in.Turning keeps the pile from compacting, which reduces airflow and slows down decomposition.
Building A Bin For Your Compost
You don't need a compost bin to make compost, All you need is a place in your yard to pile leaves, grass clippings and other yard wastes to make a compost site. But a bin keeps the compost contained and looks nicer. You can use a 4 foot wide by a 8 foot long piece of stiff wire mesh to make columns to hold the compost.
You can also build a bin using pallets were you can find almost any were for nothing. All you have to do is make two sides and a back with the front open where you can move the compost around, having three of these would be idea. You can use two to turn the compost and the third for the final product. Building or cinder blocks works good too.
You can also buy binswhich looks nice and makes it a little easier and keeps the yard looking neat. Have a look below at the different bins and tumblers from Amazon
