Composting for Beginners

Each morning you throw out a coffee filter and a handful of used coffee grinds.

Your weekend breakfast feast of bacon and eggs leaves behind a pile of broken eggshells.

The kids have an apple for a snack, but leave the core for you to pick up.

I’ve got news for you:  those coffee grinds, egg shells and apple cores are packed full of nutrients that will make awesome food for your garden if you change your habits.  Rather than throwing your kitchen scraps into the garbage, start a compost pile!

This month our focus is on greener gardening, and composting is arguably the simplest way to green up your gardening habits.

Whether you live in the city or out in the boonies, starting and maintaining a compost pile is easy as pie and this is a truth that many garden bloggers have written about with passion.

So, what exactly IS compost?

In his guest post at Garden Rant: Uprooting the Gardening World, Ed Bruske, president of DC Urban Gardeners writes,

Compost will happen in a crack in the sidewalk. It will happen in a plastic bag. It will happen in a trash can. It will happen under the old oak tree in a far corner of your yard. It will even happen if you do nothing at all.

What Ed means is that basically, all you need to do to create decent compost is to throw your kitchen scraps, as well as yard waste, including grass clippings and dead leaves, into a pile in your yard.  If you want to be neat about it, you can purchase a compost bin or build one.  Every once in awhile, give it a stir.  Add some water if the weather is dry to make sure that the pile is well aerated and moist.  Over time, your pile will become a lovely, crumbly mixture of dark earth that will improve your garden soil immeasurably!

Do you live in the city and have problems with animals?  Consider starting a worm composting bin indoors or on your fire escape.

Kathy, of I Wet My Plants, is a worm composter.  In her post, Another Crack at the Worm Bin, she writes about the process of feeding her worms.

To feed them, I put on rubber gloves, open up the worm bin, take out the top layer of newspaper and the second layer of shredded newspaper, exposing the layer of foodstuffs.  Then I dig in to the compost pail and pull out all the rotted foodstuffs that I collected the previous week. … I gently squeeze out the liquid and layer the foodstuffs thinly over the entire surface of the bin. … I put the top of the worm bin back on and that’s it.

For the more faint of heart (like me), who couldn’t manage a bin filled with worms, kitchen scraps and worm poop in their house, worm castings are available for purchase at many garden centres.

Think back yard composting is just too complicated?  It just is not...if I can do it, so can you!  For a glimpse at my simple back yard compost set-up, click here.

Comments

[margaret]

We just started a compost pile two weeks ago (and many years overdue). The girls love taking their apple cores, pear cores ect and adding to the pile. Now that it's finally started, I'm going to start adding kitchen scraps to it.

As for coffee grinds, I heard they are really good for adding to the base of lilac bushes (which I happen to have, so I'm going to try it. We already add our banana peels under neath the mulch around our rose bushes and you can tell it adds many needed nutrients. They have grown so much and flowered more since we started adding the banana peels to them!