Backyard Composting 101

Composting is Valuable

Composting is an easy and rewarding way to turn organic waste into rich, fertile soil for your garden. It’s not just good for plants—it’s good for the planet. Compost contains valuable nutrients that can replace or supplement commercial fertilizers, and properly managing garden and kitchen wastes can reduce air pollution and decrease the amount of material sent to landfills or incinerators.

Home composting is one of the most cost-effective ways to handle yard and kitchen waste, and many materials that you might be throwing away can be recycled into healthy soil. Composting is the most efficient way to divert organic waste from our county’s solid waste stream while giving it new life beneath your feet.

Compost Happens

At first, composting might seem intimidating to start although the process of decay is inevitable: to compost is to simply assist the process. Composting is the process in which we provide organic material, moisture, air, and containment. Choosing the right composting method starts with a few practical considerations that might be helpful to review before making a choice.

Considerations:

Before you start a pile of compost, you’ll want to think about placement and the materials you’ll be composting. These considerations will help in the long run for better results.

• Easy access matters – Choose a spot you can reach easily, because if it’s inconvenient, you’re less likely to use it consistently. You will also want easy access to water when building your pile and keeping it moist.
• Sun or shade location – A pile in full sun may dry out faster and need watering, while a shaded pile stays moister but may need more material to heat up.
• Available space – Large areas allow for sheet composting or passive heap piles, while smaller yards or patios may call for contained bins, tumblers, or trench methods.
• Type and volume of materials – Consider what you generate most: yard debris, food scraps, paper products, cardboard, or manure.
• Food-scrap-heavy systems – Is your composting going to be heavy with kitchen materials? There are composting methods that are better for food.
• Scale and setting – Rural or farm properties may need systems for manure, bedding, and large yard debris, often with guidance from conservation or farm-planning programs.
• Cost and effort – Options range from no-cost to low-cost DIY piles, to commercial bins or tumblers. Also consider whether you want a hands-off passive system (1–2 years) or an actively managed hot pile (8–12 weeks).

Building the Compost Headquarters

The biggest part of composting that you’ll want to gain an understanding of are how the soil food web is the headquarters for the process of decay. By creating the right environment and conditions, we are inviting a natural process to occur for a specific task.

For instance, active (hot) composting is developing organisms that thrive at higher temperatures, which can result in processing pathogens and weed seeds, however it will require consistent oversight and the help of a high nitrogen ratio or “activators”. For specific materials and instruction for hot/active composting, consider Increase Breakdown of Compost With A Special Activator by Home COmposting Made Easy. Then learn more about “Why Compost is Turned” and how this aids the “hot” composting process.

Passive (cold) systems utilize the most basic part of composting, most closely mimicking a “natural” system of decay. Think of a forest floor that has broken branches, fallen leaves, and plants that dieback at the end of the growing season, layering up over years. Or imagine grassland prairie, the buffalo roam through and their hooves carve up the ground as they graze and poo, and through the same natural process of time and growth, the prairie grass dies back and adds a layer to the ground. Composting is simple.

Harnessing the power of composting is applying what’s happening out there, to what we have around us. In your own home, you will have many materials that are used and disposed, but could they decay? In the kitchen there are food scraps and paper towels. The living room might collect paper ads from the mail, Kleenex, cardboard delivery boxes, and the bathroom has cardboard Q-Tip’s and toilet paper rolls. There are so many opportunities for us to reroute items out of the trash and use it for compost. Check out options for saving food scraps.

In-Depth Instruction for Composting:

Review this publication below to learn about soil health, god and bad materials, ratio between “greens and browns”, and then how to apply that to the basics of composting.

While some skills can be learned, much of it is about building intuition: observing how the compost changes with its moisture, smell, and the state of the material as it enters decay. There are many ways to compost, feeding into a living, dynamic process.