Composting How To’s

Whether you love organic gardening or you’re concerned about the environment, you will love the idea of composting. Composting allows you to help nature do what nature does… even in your own backyard. You’re able to help give back to the land, keep it healthier, recycle, and letting nature take its course the way it does in wild, undeveloped areas of the world.

Composting is part of the growth process for plants. As leaves die, branches break off, and flowers wilt they all fall to the ground and start the slow process of decay. As they decay they sink farther into the earth where they’ve fallen, only to eventually mix their substance and nutrients with everything else that has fallen near there too.

This is the natural order of plant life, and it’s been happening for millions of years. While plants grow they take nutrients, vitamins and minerals from the soil they’re growing in. When they die they return those nutrients and vitamins to the soil to enrich it further for the next batch of plant life that will grow there.

When you create compost, you are just doing what nature intended. Instead of throwing organic materials into a plastic bag and trucking it off to a landfill piled with mounds of plastic and metal, you put the organic materials into a more natural place: The compost pile.

Compost is so rich and fertile it’s called “black gold” by farmers and gardeners in the know. When you have compost to fertilize your gardens and fields, you’ll find yourself growing an abundance of healthy, hardy plants. It doesn’t matter if you like to grow vegetables, trees and bushes, or pretty flowers - mixing compost into the soil for them will make them amazingly beautiful, healthy and bountiful.

Since composting is a completely natural process it’s easy to start making your own. All you have to do is stop throwing away organic materials. Instead of adding scraps from fruits and vegetables to the kitchen trash can, add them to a compost bucket. And instead of raking up the grass clippings after mowing the yard, then throwing those away too, add them to your compost pile.

You can start composting just by piling organic material into a designated spot in your yard. There are fancier ways to do it too of course, such as buying various types of compost bins from the store. A simple pile in the backyard is more than enough to get started though.

Add your grass clippings, fallen leaves, wilted flowers, pine needles, and any other yard waste you may have. Put these into the compost pile and add more organic materials from the kitchen. Any type of fruit and vegetable scraps work well: Peelings, skins, cores and seeds from apples, bannanas, onions, potatoes and so on. The head from a cabbage for example, and wilted lettuce leaves are all great additions to your compost pile.

Shredded paper, cardboard, fireplace ashes and coffee or tea grounds are also excellent things to add to your compost pile. These are all organic materials which break down and combine naturally to create rich, fertile black gold for your garden.