5 Easy Steps to Making Great Compost

Hey guys, the week before Thanksgiving. And if you're in the United States, if not, it's the week before the last week in November. Anyway, this is a great time in the garden where, um, well at least here, but even if you're not gardening right now, this is a great time. Anytime, anytime is a great time to talk about composting because I think it's the lifeblood of your garden. If you're not composting and you haven't been composting because you think it's too difficult or there's too many steps involved or too many facts and figures about percentages of different types of material to put into the compost bin, stick around because in this video I'm going to go through five easy steps to great compost. Okay. So I am not a math whiz and that is what kept me from composting for a long time because there is the all important carbon to nitrogen ratio. It really did stop me from kind of going forward with it because I thought you had to have the perfect amount. Otherwise you were going to get like a smelly rotten pile of stuff that was never going to compost. Composting is pretty much built into nature. It's what everything does and it just, it knows how to do it. Now that being said, you can speed up the process by improving the nitrogen to carbon ratio and nitrogen is the green material that you add to your compost bin and carbon is the brown. So first of all, let's go through what those are, what is included in green and brown because some of them are brown like coffee grounds that are actually green. So here's a list and just because I don't know how to rattle these things off, I'm going to read it. I'm also going to list them down below in case you want, you know, an actual written copy. So for the carbon, the brown, it's obviously fall leaves, any kind of dead leaves, pine needles, twigs, chipped and shredded tree branches and bark, sawdust, corn stalks, paper, newspaper, writing, printing paper, paper plates and napkins and coffee filters. You don't want ones that have a waxy coating like the full color ads on Sunday and the newspaper that are glossy and color, not those corrugated cardboard. So all those shipments we have coming this Christmas or any time of year in our family for, from Amazon, all those cardboard boxes, rip them up, throw them in there. Drier lint, cotton fabric, corrugated cardboard. Now sometimes, you know, I know those of you back East or places that get cold winters, you do have a lot of fall leaves that you're looking to do something with. We don't have a lot of that here because we don't really have a fall season that all the leaves fall off the trees, at least not in my garden. There are trees that lose their leaves around here, but I don't have that. So when I'm running short on brown materials, uh, I actually buy a bale of straw from a feed store locally. It's $12 and literally that's at least a year's worth of just kind of fill in when I don't have that brown material. So that's the brown. So now the nitrogen, the green materials, we've got grass clippings. Uh, unless you have a lot of like dandelions that have gone to seed, um, don't mow at that time. Now I have, I had, you have dandelions, but, uh, I kind of pick them first, the ones that are kind of white and, you know, ready to blow. And then you can mow. Um, so grass clippings, coffee grounds and tea bags, vegetable and fruit scraps from the kitchen, trimmings from any type of plant from your yard, annual weeds that haven't set seed, eggshells and animal manure. Um, cow, horse, sheep, chicken, rabbit, et cetera. Uh, no meat eating animal manure, like dogs and cats. And if you live near the ocean, seaweed is a great one. So what about that ratio? You know what? There's definitely an off kind of ratio that really, if you're really dedicated and you're going to go out there with a thermometer and you want that compost in the shortest amount of time possible, and you're willing to put in the work, then there's a ratio. And it escapes me for a moment because I don't care about it too much, but I'll look it up real quick and put it on the screen here. So that's the ratio that you want. If you are like total perfection for me, I just strive for like a 50, 50 blend of green and Brown. So now that you've got the two ingredients, the green and the Brown, there's a third ingredient that is essential. And that is oxygen. Now there's a couple of ways to get oxygen into your compost. Number one is increase the surface area of the material that you put into the compost bin to increase the surface area. You want to get the pieces as small as possible. Now, if you have a chipper shredder, that's the best way. And I keep swearing that one day I'm going to invest in one of those right now. What I do is I just throw everything out on the lawn and mow over it with the lawn mower. That works really well to get all those pieces chopped up. If you have like a machete or even a stick and you have some really like fibrous stocks, maybe like squash or any watery type of stems, like here we have Canada's and gingers. You can just kind of bash those up just to kind of break them down a little bit so that those enzymes and all of the microbes can go in there and start working faster. Another way to increase the amount of oxygen in your compost heap is to turn it. Now I just do mine whenever I fill up a bin. And so I have this, this setup here. There's three bins side by side and they're actually just made out of, um, their crates made out of pallets that maybe some rock got shipped in. And so I, when I fill up the first one, I turn it over into the second one and start filling the first one again. Then when that one's full, I turn both of those over into the second and third bin and have that first bin to start again. So once it's been turned the three times into the final bin, that compost is pretty much ready to go. So the name of the game in composting is oxygen. The more oxygen you have, the better those microbes will be fed and enzymes will be fed and the faster it's going to break down. However, there is another ingredient that is needed and that is water or moisture. Now you want your compost to stay damp, not wet, not soaked. If you pick it up and squeeze it, it should be wet enough to stay together, but it shouldn't be wet enough where water will then drip out. That is one of the downfalls that we have here. We do not have rain for almost nine months out of the year. And so the only way the compost will stay wet or damp is if I use a hose or cover it with plastic. Now I used to cover it with plastic until I went out one time and took the plastic off and there was a nest of baby rats that didn't even have their eyes open yet. Freaked out and I have not covered it since, but unfortunately in our dry summers it does dry out and I don't go back there a lot. And so I don't remember to water it as often as it should. So if you live in a place where you have rainy summers, it might actually get too wet and you might have to cover it because of that. So you just want to make sure again, when you squeeze it, it stays together and it's damp, but it doesn't drip out water. So now that we know what the ingredients are to make great compost, what do we put it in? Do we have to have one of those fancy compost tumblers? Well, I actually had one of those one time and I don't know, it was more trouble than it was worth, honestly, because you have to remember to turn it. The best tip I can give you for that is try to have something that is open to the ground below the soil, because you're going to get all of that bacteria and the microbes and the enzymes and the worms coming from the ground below up into your compost. So whatever you have, it's nice to have it on open ground. Now, if you can't have it on open ground, take a little garden soil, couple of shovelfuls and mix it in. So you still get the benefit of that, but you can use a pot, big or small. You can just pile it in a heap in the corner. My grandparents used to do that work just fine. If you're going to have a container, the ideal size is three feet wide, three feet deep, three feet tall. That's going to give it the right amount of kind of heat and weight of the material in it to really start breaking down. Now, another reason why we flip, we turn the compost is because the inside, the core of that compost heap is going to be hot and it's going to be composting the fastest while the outside is going to be a little drier, a little cooler. It's not going to compost as much. So when we turn that compost, it's going to take that good inside stuff, pull it to the outside and mix it in the outside stuff to the middle. So that's another reason why you want to turn it. But as far as containers or where you're going to put it, that's pretty much all you need to know. And the last thing I wanted to talk about is products that they have on the market to speed the process along. And there's a lot of different things out there. I've tried a couple and I haven't really seen a benefit to it. So for me, if I'm spending my money, it really needs to work. Now, if you've come across something that has worked for you, please let me know in the comments. We'd all like to know. But I think the best thing you can do is build the heap on open ground, like I just mentioned and put a scoop or two of finished compost, finished homemade compost into your heap, mix it in there. So you can get all those bacteria and beneficial microbes and things and insects that have already been working, get them into the new one right away to help get that process going. So that's it. Five things, five tips to help get better compost. Don't sweat it. It's not difficult. It literally does it by itself. These are just tips to help speed up the process. So you don't get frustrated and it doesn't take forever, but you can, if you really follow these tips, you can get some really good compost in six to 12 weeks. Maybe faster depending on, you know, like I said, the dryness here is really what slows my compost down. So if I had like an automatic waterer or something, I could get compost a lot faster, but don't sweat it. It's really not that big of a deal. It is a big deal to have compost, but it's not that big of a deal to make it. It's not what it's made out to be sometimes. So don't freak out. Just get started. And you will be really happy you did come spring when you've got all this homemade compost that is way better than anything you can buy to add to your garden and to really get a jumpstart on next summer's crops. Thanks for watching guys. And I'll see you next time.