When creating a composting bin, one of the first considerations is what to compost. The number of different items that one can compost surprises many newcomers to the world of decomposition. If the goal is waste reduction, composting is one of the most efficient waste reduction methods available to people.
The bulk of a compost bin is normally fall leaves. Every fall the leaves drop from the trees, this makes fall the perfect time to start a new compost pile. Leaves are a low-nitrogen composting ingredient.
The common term for low nitrogen items is browns. A compost pile that is lacking in browns becomes a stinky, slimy mess. When leaves are not available, people can use other browns.
When you do not know what to compost in place of fall leaves, just think about where leaves come from. Almost anything made of trees is a low nitrogen ingredient. Some common household browns include newspaper, cardboard, junk mail and paper towels. Just adding these items to a compost pile gives it enough carbon to combat any odor problems.
A compost pile filled to the brim with browns does not do much. It just sits there decomposing very slowly. What the new compost pile needs now is high nitrogen items. The common term for high nitrogen items is greens. Greens include garden trimmings, fruit and vegetable waste, urine and manure.
Knowing what to compost to generate heat, increases the speed at which a gardener can harvest finished compost. A good mix of browns and greens creates the perfect environment for those heat-generating microbes. A well-constructed compost bin easily hits the 140-degree temperatures that many composters want. Although hot composting, or batch composting, is efficient, it is also time consuming. People who do not want to spend time turning, watering and monitoring their bins often turn to cold composting.
Cold composting is simply adding whatever ingredients that available to the pile with no consideration of the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio. It takes longer, but cold composting is easy. Simply add new waste to the top and harvest from the bottom. This method gives gardeners some finished compost every year. The amount of compost produced varies by type of raw materials, and how much volume the bin can hold.
Knowing what to compost does not guarantee a perfect composting operation. There are two other necessary ingredients and they are water and oxygen. Without water and oxygen, composting speed slows to a crawl.
Hot composting requires oxygen. Introduce oxygen to the compost pile by turning. The proper time to turn the compost pile is when it gets cold. This might be a few days or a week depending on the ingredients within the bin. Turning the bin causes it to heat up again.
Water is the other important ingredient. A dry pile will sit, unchanged, for a long time. Moisture gets those microbes working and turns an unpleasant mix of organic material into that beautiful black gold that all gardeners want. The trick is getting enough moisture to get things decomposing without adding so much that things become odiferous. The bin’s contents should be damp but not soaked. It takes experience to learn how much water a composting bin requires.
Learning what to add to a composting bin is just the beginning of a great adventure. People who compost are occasionally known as that crazy leaf-gathering person down the street. They are more often referred to as the person with the best garden in the neighborhood.
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