By: james ellison

Compost, made from decomposed grass clippings, leaves, twigs, and branches, becomes a dark, crumbly mixture of organic matter.

Learn how composting works. Even a newbie to composting can make good quality compost. It can be compared to cooking as art or part science. The following 7 factors will help you master the art of composting.

1. Materials

After a time anything that was once alive will naturally decompose. But, not all organic items should be composted for the home. To prepare compost, organic material, microorganisms, air, water, and a small amount of nitrogen are needed.

These items are safe to compost at home:

* grass clippings

* trimmings from hedges

* vegetable scraps

* leaves

* potting soil that has grown old

* twigs

* coffee filters with coffee grounds

* tea bags

* weeds that have not went to seed

* plant stalks

These items are Not safe to compost at home:

* weeds that have went to seed

* dead animals

* pet feces

* bread and grains

* meat

* grease

* cooking oil

* oily foods

*diseased plants

2. What To Do To Make It Work

There are small forms of plant and animal life which break down the organic material. This life is called microorganisms. From a minute amount of garden soil or manure comes plenty of microorganisms.

Nitrogen, air, and water will provide a favorable environment for the microorganisms to make the compost. Air circulation and water will keep the microorganisms healthy and working. The nitrogen feeds the tiny organisms. You may have to add a small amount of nitrogen to the pile.

Putting on too much nitrogen can kill microbes and too much water causes insufficient air in the pile. You just cannot add too much air.

3. Beneficial Microorganisms

Bacteria are the most effective compost makers in your compost pile. They are the first to break down plant tissue. Then comes the fungi and protozoans to help with the process. The arthropodes, like centipedes, beetles, millipedes and worms, bring in the finishing touches to complete the composting.

4. Smaller is Better

The materials will break down faster if the microorganisms have more surface area to eat. Chopping your garden materials with a chipper, shredder, or lawnmower will help them decompose faster.

5. Size of The Pile

The activity of millions of microorganisms generates heat in the compost pile but a minimum size 3-foot by 3-foot by 3-foot is needed for a hot, fast composting pile. Piles that are any larger may hamper the air supply needed in the pile for the microorganisms.

6. Moisture and Aeration

If you can imagine a wet squeezed out sponge with its many air pockets, then this would be the ideal enviroment for the microorganisms in the pile to function at their best. Pay attention while your pile is composting, to the amount of rain or a drought you may have. Water in a drought and maybe turn the pile in a lot of rainy days. The extremes of these two may upset the balance of the pile. The use of a pitchfork would come in handy at this time.

7. Temperature and Time

Keep your pile between 110F and 160F and the beneficial bacteria will love it. Not too cool nor too hot.

The temperature will rise over several days if you keep a good ratio of carbon and nitrogen, maintain lots of surface area within a large volume of material, and maintain adequate moisture and aeration.

-Importance of Compost-

+Compost has nutrients, but it is not a complete fertilizer.

+Compost provides nutrients in the soil until plants need to use them.

+ It loosens and aerates clay soils

+ Retains water in sandy soils.

-Using the Compost-

+ A soil amendment, mix 2 to 5 inches of compost into gardens each year before planting.

+ A potting mixture, add one part compost to two parts potting soil.

+ Make your own potting mixture by using equal parts of compost and sand or perlite.

+ A mulch, prodcast 2 to 4 inches of compost around annual flowers and vegetables, and up to 5 inches around your trees and shrubs.

+ A top dressing, mix finely sifted compost with sand and sprinkle evenly over lawns.

The final thing I would suggest once you have mastered the art of composting is to look very seriously at making your very own aerated compost tea. This elixir will give you results that are hard to believe.

By: Chris Dailey

One of the major costs when delving into the fun filled hobby or profession of organic gardening is the cost of maintaining the proper levels of nutrients in your soil each year that you grow your food. Healthy organic vegetables are a mainstay with many people and those obsessed with good health will often start their very own organic garden. One of the best ways to maintain sizable crops that are full of robust and healthy food is to make sure that you add nutrient filled compost on a regular basis. By purchasing a worm bin and raising worms which will in turn create compost for your garden is one of the most economical and smart ways of creating one of the best gardening experiences of your life. Here are a few tips on how to make sure that you can provide the best organic compost for your garden using worms and worm bins.

The first thing that you are going to need if you are going to begin to in essence to grow your own organic compost is to find an affordable worm bin. Worm bins can range from about $50-$150. You could use old wine barrels (not made from oak due to their acidic nature) or a more modern choice would be the plastic containers that have lids that come in different shapes and sizes. One thing you should consider is making sure that your worm bin is not too tall. Often times you will see pictures of them and assume that taller and larger is better whereas in reality unless you are going for worm cocoons which are often laid on the top level of the soil and compost with in the bin, you would be better off to get a short one, more like a bucket that holds five to 10 gallons, which will consolidate the worm’s efforts for creating compost and through consistent rotation generate far more compost than large worm bins ever will (think surface area not volume).

Just like an organic garden that you are growing, where drainage is a necessity for the excess water in your soil after watering, worm bins also need to have drainage holes at the bottom and also several holes that will allow air into the bedding within the bin. Depending upon the type of material that your worm bin is made of, you could probably take a power drill and bore five to 10 holes about a quarter inch in diameter around the perimeter near the top and also, if there is a lid, holes in that is well. By having proper aeration for your worms, as well as proper drainage, it will create a habitat that is conducive for optimal worm breeding as well as compost creation.

Remembering that the worms are the producers and generators of the compost that you need for your organic garden, you should know a few things about worms to make sure that they stay healthy and happy in their compost producing environment. Worms of course are made of about 80 percent water and if you let the soil within the container get to dry, they will actually begin to excrete water from their bodies in order to maintain the proper moisture balance. This of course will cause damage to the worms and they will inevitably die. Therefore, in order to make sure that their habitat stays in balance, there are a few things that you should add to the soil such as biodegradable bedding.

Biodegradable bedding can be things like dry grass, cardboard, peat moss, or even horse manure that has been heated to over 140 degrees to make sure that any bad bacteria was killed off. Using these types of bedding which have anywhere from a mildly acidic to a mildly basic p.h., help regulate moisture content within the bin and almost act like a sponge maintaining a moisture level that is adequate for the worms on a consistent basis.

Once you have the proper amount of moisture, it is time to feed your worms. Taking into account that worms are typically photo phobic to almost all kinds of visible light, make sure that some of the food scraps that you place in the bin for the worms are somewhat buried which will act as a beacon for them to crawl up and begin to eat their food. With the addition of the lid over the composting mixture, the worms will come to the top and begin feeding in a frenzy which is exactly what you want because the more they eat, and more compost they will produce. Worms love to eat most any vegetable scraps. You can also feed them bread, most grains, but always avoid dairy products and fatty foods which will actually cause the typically fragrant odor found in most worm bins into a rancid smell that you will regret later.

The end result will be a composting mixture that is rich in many necessary nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and of many other trace minerals that create one of the best organic fertilizers on the planet. By adding worm bins to your repertoire of organic gardening necessities, you will create for yourself not only an extremely productive organic garden but a vermiculture factory that will provide you with the best compost you could ever add to your garden’s soil.

By: Ellen Bell

Composting has occurred since plants first existed on the earth.  When leaves and fruit fall from trees, and when plants die, they drop to the ground, enriching the soil through the process of natural decomposition.  This is nature’s way of composting.

Humans have been composting for decades, maybe even centuries.  In our recent history, agricultural communities have used composting as a way to enrich their gardens and farmland.  In the last two decades, a much larger movement of composting in urban areas has begun, and in recent years, composting has taken on its own popularity as a new way to “go green.”  City dwellers are becoming more aware of the benefits of compost in their gardens and flowerbeds, and they are realizing that it is best to recycle natural products back to the earth.

Municipalities have had a major influence in this movement with programs to dispose of recyclable waste.  These programs allow, and sometimes require, citizens to collect their organic waste such as leaves, branches, grass, and other yard trimmings for composting.  These programs vary in season and structure but they all have the same goal of recycling natural material to the earth’s benefit.  In many cases, after the material has been composted, the city sells the compost back to citizens who wish to purchase it for their yards or gardens.  In this way, city composting programs provide two services: they allow city dwellers to compost their organic waste, and they also make compost material available for sale at reasonable prices.

A municipal composting program may seem simple, but it can be a large project to manage.  First, the citizens of the municipality must be educated about what types of products can be collected and how they are to be contained.  Some city composting programs only collect yard waste, while others also allow food scraps.  Second, the city must decide how they wish to collect the waste.  Some municipalities use bulk collection, where leaves and waste are piled in the street or yard and trucks come collect the debris.  Another way to collect the waste is through drop off sites where citizens can take their waste to a central collection area.  Other communities use container collection, where the waste is put in specific types of containers such as biodegradable brown paper bags or in reusable containers and is collected by trucks.

After trucks have picked up the organic waste, the material must be transported to a central composting site to be processed and composted.  Several months later, the waste you threw out will be available again for resale to citizens as premium compost.  Compost can be used in many ways.  Premium compost is a great way to enrich your soil, control erosion, or simply help your plants grow bigger and stronger!

The US Environmental Protection Agency indicates that 24% of the United States’ solid waste is made up of yard trimmings and food scraps.  Just think how much waste we could keep out of landfills if more cities began composting programs!  With the ability to convert all this waste into premium compost and return it to the earth, these programs are hugely beneficial.  If your city doesn’t have an organized composting program, contact local officials in your area and prompt them to begin one.  This is a way to get involved and give something back to this planet that we inhabit.

By: Chris Dailey

Organic compost is a potent resource for nutrients, however, because of this, there is something that needs to be said regarding its use with bulbs and how much compost to use with these plants as you carry them over into the next season. Typically with plants that are used in the springtime such as an Amaryllis, there is a certain process that must be done prior to a successful planting so that they can bloom in the spring season. Here are a few tips on how to use organic compost in a proper way in order to prepare your plants with bulbs to bloom in a healthy way.

There are many examples of what to do with bulbs and how to have them successfully treated so that they can almost on autopilot bloom when the right time comes. Let’s say for example that you acquired bulbs that flower in the spring, but you did not get them all planted in time so that the process can occur. What you want to make sure happens is that you have enough organic fertilizer in the pot prior to the cold season where the bulbs will sit for weeks in order to allow the roots of this plant to absorb enough nutrients in order to be ready for a fresh bloom the following season.

What will happen is that a plant that does not have enough nutrients will have a bulb that will not root and therefore will not grow or bloom successfully. Sometimes a good avenue is to wait until the following season, but the problem is that initially nutrients were not stored. This is where using organic compost, whether purchased or created from a worm bin, can be used in order to ensure that each season your blooms are successful. Here is the process.

Remembering that most roots need temperatures above freezing but no more than 35 or 40 degrees in order to prepare them for the growing season in spring, you need to expose the roots, once it has finished blooming, to the right amount of water and fertilizer throughout the winter in order to properly treat the bulb. In what I would call a resting season, a period of about seven to eight weeks, once the leaves have died back and the plant is growing no more, stop adding new fertilizer and only used a trickle of water until springtime reoccurs. Doing so will ensure that the bulb has time to rejuvenate and be ready to bloom in the spring.

What you want to be careful with is how much fertilizer you use. If this is regular fertilizer you can use a normal amount in proportion to the plant that you are growing and also the space and amount of dirt that you are using. Obviously you would not mix half fertilizer and half dirt as this may have a burning or adverse affect on the root system. If using pure worm compost, you could actually grow a plant in this with no dirt with no adverse effect to the plant, however in that we are focusing upon bulbs, the period of time where the plant is dying back, compost needs to be used in small amounts as you also decrease the water supply. This gives the bulb the opportunity to die in essence and be reborn in the spring.

One other thing to consider with this system is the container that the plant is in. Make sure that the bottom of the plant has ample drainage. Do not use stones or pebbles at the bottom of your container and if you can make sure it is not a plastic pot or container but one that is made of clay which dries out much faster than any kind of plastic. What you want to be sure of is not getting root rot in the last few days prior to the plant dying back because this will affect the nutrient flow into the bulb which will have fill effects in the springtime season.

To conclude, compost is a necessary ingredient in all planting, whether you are using it on a large scale farm or on a small scale in your home with a few plants. Be careful of the type of fertilizer that you use. If you are using straight worm compost, this is a safer bet in bad you can actually grow plants in your warm fertilizer without an adverse effect to the plant. Make sure that you back off on the amount of composting material you used in the dirt weeks prior to the plant dying off. This will be signified by losing its leaves and flowers at any.

Finally, bring almost all watering and composting efforts to a standstill before you clip the plant and store it in a cold covered area to be ready for the next spring season. In this way you can create a healthy and predictable replanting of your bulbs while safely energizing them for the next season with your organic compost.

By: MIKE SELVON

There are many instances when homeowners choose not to get started with backyard composting because of the perception that it is hard to do correctly. In reality, you just need to collect the basic organic materials, find a place for the compost heap and then allow nature to take over the task. But, there are some basic guidelines to keep in mind that can help make the whole process move forward without a hitch.

There are a number of different types of compost bins on the market that you can use to help manage and contain your compost. But, a special bin is not a requirement that is needed to accomplish successful composting, but more of a convenience. It is easy enough to build your own bin for your pile and simply cover it over with a sheet of polythene or chunk of cardboard.

Some people, however, prefer to have their compost heap more contained and neat in appearance and to have it easier to manage as well. If that is the case, then compost bins can be a good solution.

These special bins are easy enough to find online or at local stores that sell organic gardening tools and supplies. Some local municipalities also have compost bins available at a reduced cost to encourage people to recycle their organic waste.

Making a compost is as simple as adding your organic items that are compostable on a regular basis. Any waste product that was at one time a living thing will compost, or decompose, but some items are not recommended to be thrown into your pile. Meats, dairy foods and cooked foods will end up attracting pests and vermin so these should not be used in your home composting efforts.

Dead and decaying leaves, lawn clippings, manure, and kitchen waste such as rinds, peelings, coffee grounds and even eggshells can be added to it. Older, thicker and tougher plant materials are slower to decompose but they benefit the compost by providing more substance, or body, to the finished product. These heavier materials usually comprise most of a compost pile.

Wood items take a long time to decompose. Whenever possible it is best to shred, chip or chop wood materials to help accelerate the rotting process. However, as long as they are mixed in with other materials that decompose faster they will still provide some benefit to the process overall.

In general it is best to have fairly equal amounts of what is called brown material and green material in it. Brown materials are the manures, dead leaves, small twigs and cardboard and newspapers. Green materials include hedge and grass clippings, coffee grounds, fruit rinds and uncooked vegetables.

You only need to have about one foot of organic material to get your compost heap started. In most instances, just mowing the yard and weeding your flowerbeds and vegetable garden will give you enough to begin. If needed, then you can also add organic kitchen waste and newspaper, and even a little straw if you are coming up short of the one foot level.

Once things get piled up, nature will take over and the decomposition process will start. It is good to turn the heap about every two weeks and within four to six months you will have a nice compost of waste materials that will give a boost to your soil.