How to Compost And Make Your Garden Beautiful and Rich!

Composting is very simple, easy to do, doesn't require a great deal of effort, isn't complex from an inputs perspective and can return great benefits to your garden and soil amendments. Let's start by looking at the basics:

Compost is simply broken down organic matter. Through a cycle of microorganisms and worms and bugs consuming brown and green material and the carbon and nitrogen in them, they breakdown this mixture and the result is a rich soil or compost that contains all the good stuff you need to grow plants, far better than a chemically produced fertilizer.

Now if you just had a big heap of green leaves and brown leaves and kitchen scraps you would sooner or later be looking at a bunch of compost. In nature this process occurs naturally as dead leaves fall on green plants mixed with animal waste too. But being intelligent beings we are going to maximize the natural method by creating the perfect mix of these materials in a concentrated area to result in deep rich compost in a fraction of the time nature takes to create the same.

Without going into detail on the way the microorganisms break down this material we will keep it simple. They need about 30 units of brown matter(or carbon rich stuff) for every 1 unit of green matter(nitrogen rich stuff). This is called the 30:1 ratio of C:N (carbon to nitrogen) to which we strive. This results in the best breakdown time(with some other physical considerations) and will be the easiest way to make compost. The only problem is that there isn't really anything that perfectly fits this ratio on its own. Here is a list of ratios of common materials we will work with:

sawdust - 500:1

dry brown leaves - 50:1

kitchen scraps (no meats!) - 12:1

grass clippings - 20:1 to 30:1

These ratios are by volume, so lets look at an example of some combinations:

1 pound dry brown leaves(50:1) + 1 pound scraps(12:1) + 1 pound grass clippings(20:1) = 82:3 = 27:1

That's not too far off the mark, but we might need to add a little more brown leaves or a little less kitchen scraps to hit 30:1

Another key to quick decomposition is surface area. Greater surface area is achieved through finer cut and chopped up stuff. Its easier for the bacteria, fungi and worms/insects to eat the smaller particles and having more surface area means more contact with air. Since we are creating an aerobic breakdown of the organic matter, we need lots of oxygen. This leads to the next key in composting.

The breakdown process will use up all the oxygen within your pile which means that from time to time you will need to aerate your pile. A shovel or pitchfork are simple tools to get your newly added matter into contact with the microbes and get them the oxygen they need to decompose the organics into the really good stuff. About every 10 to 14 is a good rule for turning your pile. When you turn your pile its a good idea to spray it down with a little bit of water. A moist environment will promote the breakdown, but not too wet. If it's too dry the microbes fall asleep, if it's too wet they will trap gases in the pile and we start a smelly form of decomposition called anaerobic.