Composting for Serious Gardeners With more than forty years of experience redefining gardening's boundaries, author Will Bonsall shows how readers can eliminate the use of off-farm inputs like fertilizers, minerals, and animal manures by practicing a purely veganic, or plant-based, agriculture-not for strictly moral or philosophical reasons, but because it is more ecologically efficient and makes good business sense. In Will Bonsall’s Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening, (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015) he offers readers in-depth information on growing, harvesting, and processing an incredibly diverse variety of food crops. The following excerpt is from Chapter 1, “Composting as if it Mattered.” You can purchase this book from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS STORE: Will Bonsall’s Essential Guide to Radical Self-Reliant Gardening. I make compost and lots of it, and not just because it’s something hippie homesteaders are expected to do, but because I get a kick out of doing it. So then, what do you do with it?
3 Composting Techniques Everyone Should Know We all know by now that composting is important to the environment. It allows natural waste to return to the earth, while adding a nutrient rich material to our gardens. Here is a break down of the top 3 most common techniques for composting for the home gardener. Hot Composting – Open Bins Hot composting is the most intensive method, but also the fastest way to get finished compost. Build or buy three, side by side compost bins. Bin #1 will be for brown materials…kind of a holding area for things you want to compost. Bin #2 is where all the action happens. The benefits to having the three bin system is that you can continue to collect brown materials during the season in bin #1, and that once you move the compost to bin #3 to settle, you can start over again with a new compost pile. You can also create a hot compost pile in just one bin if you have don’t have space, or don’t have much material to compost… it just means you can only work on one pile of compost at a time. That’s it!
How To Compost Like A Boss If you are a newbie to composting and struggle to wrap your head around exactly how to make a compost pile, then here’s a ‘how to’ graphic that shows you how to compost. When I first started a compost pile I completely botched the greens/browns ratio, resulting in a pile that took over a year to compost. It is my hope that this visual guide helps your first compost pile turn into a success, so that you can start successfully increasing the fertility of your garden soils. Click On The Graphic To Enlarge Feel free to share on your site by copy and pasting the code below: <p align="center"><a href=" alt="How To Compost" src=" /></a></p><p align="center">How To Compost Brought To You By: <a href="
Potholes & Pantyhose | DIY Spinning Composter This year was my first year for a full-fledged garden. I consider it full-fledged because it produced enough to not only feed Biceps and I, but it also allowed me to dehydrate, freeze and give-away the excess. To be honest, I was just happy that anything sprouted from the earth. I give props to the composted kitchen and yard waste that we added to the soil-this garden seemed to outperform many of my neighbors’ gardens. And just in case you don’t want to go spend your hard earned dollars buying a fancy composter in excess of $100 bucks or more, I thought I would show you how to make your own using some recycled and some store bought materials for about $30 in a matter of hours. (Here’s my video for my DIY Spinning Composter.) Here’s what you’ll need for your very own composter (The store bought materials can all be found at Lowe’s): Here are the tools you will need to complete the project: Let’s get started! Determine which end is up for you and your barrel.
Composting 101 for citydwellers | Page 4 As Tom Philpott wrote in the introductory essay to Grist’s Feeding the City series, urban agriculture took a huge hit once combustible-fuel machines replaced horses — and horse manure — as the vehicle of choice in cities. Farms need fertilizer, and it’s more efficient to grow where the sources of it live and poop. However, every day city dwellers throw away huge amounts of organic matter that could be turned into that precious material — through composting. Yard trimmings and food scraps make up 26 percent of U.S. waste, and once this organic matter hits the landfill, it breaks down slowly due to lack of air: your farmers-market tomato can produce methane, a deadly greenhouse gas, in a not-so-green afterlife. If you’re going to all the trouble to eat locally grown, organic vegetables, it’s rather a shame to truck their remains away to landfill prison when you could be feeding them back to the earth. So why aren’t you composting yet? First, you need to know the basics. Municipal composting
Build a Worm Tower To Spread Compost Over Your Garden A worm tower not only enables worms do their work at composting, but it also helps them spread out and distribute the compost in your tank garden. This is such a low maintenance way of keeping nutrients cycling in your garden, and easy to put together. All you'll need is a 3 or 4 foot piece of PVC piping (or a 12" concrete pipe) and a flower pot. According to Ecofilms, be sure to use a food grade PVC pipe to avoid any chemical contamination - and the concrete pipe often works best. Punch holes in the side of the pipe. This is where the worms will travel back and forth between the compost and the garden patch. Once you've got your pipe, the next step is to bury the tower half way down in your garden with half of the pipe sticking out the top. Then, add some manure, compost worms (it's important to use compost worms), and secure with a flower pot lid. via Eco Films
Hot Compost – Composting in 18 Days Regular composting, also known as “cold composting”, involves placing a variety of organic materials in a compost bin, enclosure, or even just in a large heap, and leaving it there until it breaks down several months later. It’s a very slow process and typically takes 6 to 12 months. It can be sped up by turning the compost, that is, moving around the material at the bottom of the heap to the top and vice versa to mix it up and get more oxygen in there, but it’s still a long wait. The other approach to composting is “hot composting”, which produces compost in a much shorter time. It has the benefits of killing weed seeds and pathogens (diseases), and breaking down the material into very fine compost. In contrast, cold composting does not destroy seeds, so if you cold compost weeds, any weed seeds will grow when you put the compost into the garden. The requirements for hot composting using the Berkley method are as follows: Composting Materials and the Carbon-Nitrogen Balance Like this:
Cohabitat - Photos du journal Screen Compost Now to Make Your Own Seed Compost for Spring If you make a plentiful supply of good compost, you can screen it to remove large particles and be self-sufficient in seedling and potting compost. In the summer months, compost piles work fast. If you can set aside some time before cold weather to screen the amount of compost you will need for seedlings in the spring, you can then have unfrozen compost ready to use when you need it in January or February. Even better, if you put the screened compost into some kind of bin, bed or box in your greenhouse, you can transplant lettuce into it, and the watering to keep the lettuce growing will help the compost organisms to mellow out the compost over the winter. Worm eggs will hatch out, the lettuce roots will make air channels throughout the bin, and you can harvest the lettuce before you need to sow seedlings. Making Compost Screens There are two basic styles of compost screen. To make a flat compost screen, cut two sets of battens and make two frames that will sit on top of a wheelbarrow.
Composting Techniques for Anyone Compost bins can be made of repurposed materials, like these pallets. Composting doesn’t have to be difficult, nor does it require a strong back, large acreage, livestock waste or expensive bins. Even apartment-dwellers or those with physical limitations can put their kitchen waste to work. The following are composting techniques from the simplest to the most strenuous. The easiest method of using kitchen waste and thin paper goods is to bury them. If digging is out of the question, use your blender. The next step up is cold composting, which is throwing your biodegradable waste into a stationary, closed compost bin. If your compost bin is a tumbler, meaning that the barrel that holds the compost can be externally turned, then you should have hot compost. The next, more difficult type of composting requires a shovel. Then there is the three-bin composting technique, which requires regular turning. A covered 18-day compost heap in progress
How to Make Compost Compost is the ultimate ingredient for building fertile soil. If everyone composted their kitchen and garden waste, the world would be a cleaner place, and we would all enjoy more productive organic gardens. Some folks are intimidated by this unfamiliar and seemingly mysterious process — but have no fear! Composting is nothing more than guiding the natural process by which organic wastes decompose. You simply cannot do it wrong. Composting is so worth the effort. Compost also vastly improves soil structure, allows the soil to hold in moisture better and improves friability (workability). After surveying hundreds of MOTHER EARTH NEWS readers and checking out what our Facebook community had to say during Compost Awareness Week 2012, we were blown away by the many answers to the question of how to make compost at home. Many households compost using multiple methods, and the techniques described here are a distillation of strategies employed by MOTHER EARTH NEWS readers. Sizing Up Composters