Posted on July 20, 2007 in latest news
Gardeners often refer to compost as ‘black gold’. Having your own Compost Pile is a win-win situation both for your garden and your pocket. Here is your guide to making your own Compost.
Ingredients
- Your kitchen waste – Anything from left over stale food, used tea bags, vegetable and fruit remnants. Even net shells and egg shells. However keep it vegetarian. No meat trimmings or bones.
- Your Lawn refuse – You can use your garden debris, dead leaves, pine cones, pine needles or grass clippings. However please abstain from putting in weeds because if they don’t decompose in your compost you will regret it.
- Other Items – You can put in your cow’s poop, if you have one that is. (You can excuse your pet dogs and cats out of this please) Else you can throw in some saw dust, left over straw, sea weed or a little manure.
- The idea here is to put in organic material that can be easily broken down or decomposed by Microbes.
Procedure
- Chop and Layer your Ingredients – A common mistake that people commit while preparing compost is that they dump thick layer of one ingredient over which they add another thick layer of the other ingredient – an obviously wrong approach. In order to get a good homogeneous compost use a simple technique – Chop and Layer. Chop your ingredients to small pieces and evenly layer them one over other.
- Speed up the Decomposition – Normally ingredients take a lot of time to decompose because either they are not put in proportionately or there the compost is not well aerated. The ideal proportion would be to have for every one portion of wet ingredients like your stale food and vegetable remnants, twice as much dry ingredients like dried leaves or straw or saw dust. This will help your ingredients to decompose very quickly.
- Mix and Turn – It is very important to mix and turn your compost every week. This will not only help the ingredients mix evenly but also help to aerate your compost. Aeration is very important as it helps Microbes to break down the organic matter you keep putting in. Plus it also prevents your compost from becoming terribly stinky and supports speedy decomposition.
Result
After six months of regular contribution of ingredients, proper aeration and mixing, you will be blessed with a sweetly earthy smelling black gold, ready for use. Tempting as it seems, you wouldn’t wait to use it on your plants and see the results it yields. But ideally, you should wait till spring time to make most of it.
You can spread a 2 inches thick layer of your homemade compost over your soil bed. Mix it with your soil. And take pride in your free home made fertilizer and mulch.
All the best for your composting adventure.
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July 21st, 2007 at 10:25 am
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