Home Composting is Simple and Beneficial

As I drive around town I wince when I see that people are bagging their leaves for trash pickup or dumping their grass clippings and other plant waste “over their fence” or in the nearby woods etc or even carting it all to the transfer station for disposal. Unfortunately many of these neighbors do not realize how simple and beneficial it would be to set up a composting system at home and turn this into food for their vegetable and flower garden plants or their trees and shrubbery. Money would also be saved in the process!

A purchased compost bin like this “Earth Machine" bin is all you need to start:

http://www.earthmachine.com/

This sleek looking piece of “yard furniture” can be located near your kitchen door or out right in your garden so you can easily add material to it frequently. A nice instruction booklet comes with the composter as well.

Another possibility would be to make your own compost bins from old wood pallets often found for free. This image shows some of my compost bins. They might not be pretty but are easy to load with grass clippings, weeds, ground up leaves and kitchen waste. Also, the bins’ openness lets me turn the pile easily with a pitch fork to speed up the composting process. At least once a season, I visit a local dairy farm with my pickup truck and purchase, for $15, a load of cow manure. I back right up to the bins and add some manure as well as put some manure directly on the garden in the fall after the harvest of vegetables.

Another variation of composting is to add the waste materials directly to the gardens around the base of growing plants. There is no reason that you cannot simple put the coffee grounds, grass clippings or ground up leaves right on top of the soil around the plants or on top of the garden throughout, especially at the end of the season. Some decomposition will occur over the winter and this blanketing help to kill off weeds. Some gardeners even buried their kitchen scraps directly in their garden throughout the season. I prefer the bin method but do use some plant materials for mulch in the garden to stifle weeds and retain moisture for the growing plants.

Lastly, I should mention something called “lasagna gardening.” If you want to start a new flowerbed or vegetable garden spot in your yard currently a portion of your lawn, the task of digging up the sod is quite daunting. A smart and easy method to prepare the new garden spot would be to use this lasagna method. Start with a layer of cardboard and/or newspapers several layers thick, wet it down and then pile on some compost, ground up leaves, grass clippings or whatever you have on hand. Periodically add more layers of materials to this pile as the weeks go one. To your great surprise in a few months or if started in the fall, next spring you will find that a shovel easily goes through the composting materials and the sod is now soft and full of worms. You can simply insert bulbs, plants etc. into the individual holes you easily dig. The weeds and previous grass doesn’t have a chance to survive either. I have even found that by the second season you can plant rows of seeds in this new spot because by then all the “lasagna” layers have turned to soil.

So my advice is to get a kitchen scrap bucket and place it on the counter near the sink or under the counter. Put all your fruit and vegetable scraps in it (no bones or meat scraps) and take it outside regularly to your new compost bins and get busy putting back into the soil this waste instead of in the garbage can!