3 Simple Steps For Quick Compost

Of all the things that you could put into your soil to make it better and help your plants thrive, compost is the single best ingredient for that. And in this video, I'm going to share a super simple recipe so that you can make your own compost at home quickly and easily. Now, the recipe I'm about to share with you may sound super simple, but that's because it is. It's still the classic way to make compost, whether you're doing it in your own backyard or doing it professionally. But once you know the steps, you can cook up the perfect recipe every time. The main ingredients for making compost are carbon, which are the brown waste, nitrogen, which includes the green waste, air, and water. Here are the steps to prepare your own compost. Combine generous portions of green and brown ingredients and allow them to cook outdoors for several months. And I'll give you examples for each of these in just a bit. But just start piling up the ingredients in a convenient place, and a corner of your yard is common option. Continue to add brown and green ingredients until the pile is approximately four feet by four feet by four feet. Mix the ingredients often, every week is good, and add water to moisten, about like a damp sponge. And that's how you get the other two ingredients into the mix. The turning introduces the oxygen, and adding the water keeps it moist. Your compost is ready to serve when the ingredients are unrecognizable, the internal temperature is ambient, and the contents smell rich and earthy. Add to the existing garden soil at about 30 percent by volume, and mix into the top four inches of any garden bed, or simply add it to the surface. Now the time it takes for the compost ingredients to break down at home typically is several months, but there are several variables at play that determine how quickly those ingredients break down. Once you understand that compost is made up of billions and billions of living microscopic organisms, it's easy to understand why air and water are so essential to sustaining life, even in the smallest forms. But in the presence of air and water, they're able to break down the green waste, which is the nitrogen, and the brown waste, which is the carbon, into finished compost. So let's talk more about those four main ingredients, starting with air. Oxygen really, microorganisms can't live without it, it's that simple. Mix up your ingredients often, at least once a week if you can, to keep it well aerated. Water. When it comes to remembering how wet your compost should be, think in terms of making and keeping it at the moisture level of a damp sponge. Keeping your composting material aerated and consistently moist is a major factor in making compost faster. The raw material. Fortunately, you don't have to know anything about science to figure out how to get a reasonable balance of the carbon, the browns, and nitrogens, the greens, into the mix. I think in terms of anything that came from the earth originally in some living plant form, no matter what it is today, is biodegradable and can be added into your composting system. And that's pretty much my guide for considering what I put into my compost. Common examples of brown ingredients include dried leaves, small twigs, yard debris, shredded paper and newspapers, paper towel rolls, and brown paper bags. Common examples of green ingredients include fresh grass clippings, plant trimmings, and food scraps such as vegetables and salad greens and coffee grounds. Now let's talk about a few common ingredients that you might also be tempted to add into your compost, but I recommend that you play it safe and leave the following items out. From outside in the garden, leave the weeds that are going to seed out of your compost because if the compost does not get hot enough, the weed seeds aren't killed off in the process and then you could be adding more weed seeds into your garden next spring or fall and you don't want that. Same thing with plants that have diseases on them. Those spores need high heat to kill them and if your compost isn't getting hot enough during that breakdown process, you may be adding those diseases back into your garden next season. So leave the diseased plants out and throw them away and get them off your property. Animal waste, at least from carnivores. Now herbivores like chickens and rabbits and horses, in most cases that's going to be okay, but leave the carnivorous animal waste out of your compost. And then grass clippings and plant debris that has been sprayed with either herbicide or a pesticide. Many times those products don't break down in the composting process either, so let's play it safe and leave those out. But still, you've got plenty of options to put into your compost to make quick compost quickly and easily and depending on how often you turn it and keeping it moist and getting it to a critical mass, like I said four feet by four feet by four feet, you're going to have compost in just a matter of months and you're going to have the best garden soil you've ever had because of it.