By: Paul Hata

Compost serves as a growing medium,or a porous, absorbent material that holds moisture and soluble minerals, providing the support and nutrients in which most plants will flourish.Organic compost is the best material to grow your plants in. Compost is the type of soil plants really love to grow in, because it is made from lots of great organic material. It is the safest kind of material to grow your plants in.

How Do Make Organic Compost

1.You need to start with a base of material that is rich in carbon.You will need things like straw, dead flowers, shredded newspaper, and dried leaves. Some people forget to add these brown materials, but the are essential.

2.You need green materials that are high in nitrogen.These materials include things like kitchen waste from plants, animal manure, green garden clippings, and grass clippings. You can use all kinds of fruit and vegetable peelings and leftovers, but no meat!

3.You need a little bit of soil from your garden.It is important for you to remember that you should actually add a bit of natural soil to your compost to get it started. You cab start by putting down a layer of your brown material. This could be straw, dry leaves, or even shredded newspapers if you do not have anything else. On top of that, you can add some of your green stuff, then a layer of soil. Then you add more of your brown material to the top. Finally, you need to add water to these layers. Just moisten them, do not drown them!

4.Continue the above by adding layers until you have a compost pile that is around 3 feet wide and 3 feet high. You should probably have a ratio of about three parts brown material to one part of green material. If your pile is not 3 feet tall yet, just keep adding material to it whenever you have it available.

5.About once every week or two, you should turn your compost pile. This means using something like a garden fork (a pitchfork) to stir your pile. You want to work all of the stuff in the middle out toward the edges, and move the outer material inward toward the middle.

Be sure to keep your compost pile moist. It should never be soggy, but be sure not to let it dry out. If your compost pile gets too dry, it will stop decomposing properly. If you see steam coming up from your pile when you turn it, you can be pretty sure everything is decomposing properly.

You can add earthworms to your compost pile if you want. They find the pile on their own, but you can speed the process up a big by adding some to the pile yourself. You can buy earthworms at a fishing bait store and use those.

6.Build or buy a bin to house your compost pile.This can help keep your pile neat and tidy, so it does not pread out too much. You can also buy rotating compost bins that you can turn in order to mix your compost. These are not necessary, but they can make your job easier.

Once your compost turns into a rich, nearly black material, it will start to smell much better. Your new compost will smell a bit sweet. Once it turns black and starts to smell sweet, it is ready to be mixed with your regular garden soil. In fact, you can use this rich compost as potting soil, usually with nothing else added. You can even replace most of the soil in your garden with this material, or use it in raised beds.

By: Mariam Ma

It’s funny that as humans evolve, things get back to the basics. This is especially true in the environment front. We have learned that if we want a hospitable planet for our children’s future, we must protect the Earth now.

Every grade school child knows the importance of reuse, reduce, and recycle; what better way to help the planet and learn about biology than with composting right in your own backyard garden? It also saves you money as you won’t have to worry about buying commercial fertilizer. It’s all in your kitchen scraps!

How does composting work?

Compost is really the end product of the breakdown of organic matter. Microorganisms feed off organic matter and what’s left is compost.

When people say they want to compost, there are two options. One can decide for a passive process or an active process.

As the name implies, there is little work to be done in the passive process. One just needs to collect compost material such as grass clippings and kitchen refuse and put them in an closed off pile in the backyard. Make sure that the kitchen scraps are well covered with other organic material to avoid animals looking for a free meal!

While little effort is required in the passive approach to composting, it is indeed slow and you might be waiting well over a year or two for complete decomposition.

Active composting requires more work, but not much with the proper equipment. Active composting is just helping nature along by providing the right conditions for the decomposition process. Decomposition is faster when the organic material is kept in a warm, damp and well oxygenated environment. By having a compost bin, not only does it provide a neater appearance in your backyard but it also offers a controlled environment in which to produce your compost. Add a thermometer to a compost tumbler to turn over the compost and it’s got a great mix for composting.

As you can see, the effort involved in composting is not that much but the benefits of using compost are many. The byproducts of microorganisms breaking down organic material provides great nutrients for plants as well as the compost is nitrogen and potassium rich which helps maintain ideal soil condition. Compost also improves water retention in the soil as well as texture and aeration.

Other benefits of composting include the reduction of wastes into our landfill. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, it’s important that our children inherit a healthy planet. And what better way to pass on our gift than by involving our children in the process as well. Every school aged child knows about reduce, reuse and recycle. Composting involves all these steps plus the benefit of watching your garden grow! What a practical lesson for any child.

By: MIKE SELVON

Each year in the spring people venture outdoors to begin planting their gardens and flower beds. The allure of warm, gentle days seems to call out the winter hermits in an act of reseeding the world with beauty and divine scents.

One thing that does not make sense is the amount of money spent on commercial fertilizers and compost. Composting yourself is free and makes some of the best fertilizer in the world. Sure, it does take some time but if you start work on it early you can have rich, dark soil by the time planting season comes around.

Composting is environmentally friendly and once you know what can be composted and what cannot, you will be on your way to being eco-friendly. In this article the basics of composting will be covered such as what it actually is technically and how you can begin your own compost heap in your own backyard.

What is composting?

Composting is the process of taking organic material and breaking it down through a variety of chemical and animal processes to achieve fertilizer and plant building material that is both cheap and highly effective. It is very environmentally friendly and is a great way to avoid paying those high costs of bags of fertilizer.

You can utilize those leftover food wastes, animal wastes, grass clippings, branches and other organic materials to create a loamy material that will help your plants grow to their maximum potential like no other commercial grade fertilizer possibly can. The best part is that it is free!

What can I use to help the material break down?

If you want your compost heap and material to break down faster you are going to need to keep it aerated, moist and broken into smaller pieces. You can also help break down the material by adding worms and other small insects into the pile that will help eat the organic material.

Their waste products are filled with great nutrients for the soil and before long you will have a compost heap that is ready to hit the garden to begin the cycle all over again. It is a circle of life that is a great example of Mother Nature at her finest and shows what recycling can do for the environment.

How does compost improve the soil?

Composting adds valuable nutrients back into the soil such as Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen. There are other essential elements that are added that will all work together to add the depleted minerals from the growth cycle back into the soil after a plant has used them. Consider it a natural cycle that is essential for plants, grasses, trees and flowers to grow and thrive.

How do I prepare the materials for composting?

Start preparing your compost pile by breaking up the materials into manageable pieces. The object is to help the materials break down or decompose faster. Larger pieces will hinder the process. A shredder works wonders for yard trimmings.

If you are using manure you will want to take a pitch fork and break up the clumps before adding them into the pile. Try to keep the pieces to sizes around the shape of a leaf if it is at all possible.

If you can keep them even smaller to help speed up the process that much faster and before long you will have a mound of fertilizer to use however you see fit.