How to Make Compost

There are many easy ways to make compost for a home garden. Learn how to make compost with some of the fun, creative, and best ways to make this useful fertilizer for your garden. Homemade compost is both a good way to reduce vegetable, fruit, and yard wastes to a usable, useful, garden amendment, and an awesome garden amendment.

Compost is the natural breakdown of nitrogen rich materials, carbon rich materials, and a smaller quantity of other compost-able materials into usable, usually nutrient rich, soil. Creating a home compost container, heap, or three step compost system is a good way to reduce yard and garden waste. It also keeps the nutrients from your property, on your property.

A compost bin naturally engages the processes of nature, the microbes, bacteria, molds, and fungi, that break down carbon and nitrogen rich materials in the forest, and speeds up the process. It also keeps the process contained so you can retrieve your compost, and sometimes worm castings, for use in your gardens, potted plants, and more.

Compost is not technically a fertilizer, but many people use their homemade compost as a top dressing amendment in their garden. It can improve plant growth, soil water retention, and generally improve your garden’s soil. Compost can also be used as a mulch, though I prefer putting compost under a wood chip, or straw, mulch instead.

Compost Ingredients:

Nitrogen rich materials can be manure, if you have a pet rabbit, chickens, horse stables nearbye, or another source of local manure. Compost that includes urea, found in manure and waste bedding, is often hotter and composts faster than compost piles built out of just green and brown plant materials.

Nitrogen rich materials are usually green, still green grasses, leaves, and herbaceous plants. Materials to avoid, for nitrogen, include anything that is has pests or a fungal disease. These may not be killed in the composting process. The same goes for seed heads and ripe seeds. Often home composting isn’t hot enough to kill seeds, so you may get volunteers from your compost pile. Volunteers can be great, but you’ll want to minimize adding mature thistles, stinging nettle, or other annoying weeds to the compost pile.

Carbon rich materials are usually brown materials, dried grasses for example. Once grass is no longer green, it has higher carbon than nitrogen and is suitable as a dry, brown, or carbon addition to your homemade compost. Other options for brown material include twigs and chopped, small branches, plain newspaper, plain cardboard, straw, and small portions of chopped dry leaves. Leaves make leaf mold and topsoil on their own, so may be better as a mulch rather than in the compost. Too much leaves in the compost can also cause a layered sheeting effect, where they mat together and don’t break down easily.

Wood chips can also be added as a carbon material, but I’d add no more than ten percent wood chips to a compost pile. I’d use five percent, or less, if they are resinous wood chips, unless they’d been used as animal bedding. Wood chips can bind additional nitrogen, more than straw or finer twigs and small branches.

Things to add in small quantities include certain kitchen scraps. Things like orange peels, lemon peels, and other citrus peels break down very slowly. They have high anti-microbial properties and take a long time to break down. Chop up peels like this to make them break down faster, but also keep the number added to your pile or compost tumblers to a minimum. Egg shells are another one that can be a bit finicky. Crush eggshells before adding them to the pile, worms will snack on them a bit for the calcium, and they will break down better if they are crushed. Too much tea bags or coffee grounds can acidify a compost pile, these are also brown materials, not green. So avoid dumping an entire 4 gallon bucket of coffee grounds into the pile at once, unless layering it with some greens like grass clippings.

Lastly, avoid adding anything that could carry parasites or harmful bacteria. This includes pet feces, from your cat or dog. Dairy that breaks down slowly and can attract pests. And meat products, whether raw or cooked, that break down slowly and can attract pests. Put these things, and any garden waste you don’t want to compost yourself, into municipal composting if your city has it. Municipal composting gets a lot hotter than your home compost bin can.

Note: If you’re in a city that gives away free municipal compost, I’d use it only on decorative plants. If you chose to get it. I’d avoid using it in your food garden, as you don’t know what actually went into it and their could be pesticide or herbicide residues that you don’t want to introduce to your garden.

How to Make Compost:

There are a few options for starting your compost making adventures, there’s the three pile method, the compost barrel, and the compost turner. Each of these methods will produce good compost.

A compost turner is a round barrel, usually on a stand, that is horizontally oriented. This is an awesome, contained, composter that fits well on smaller lots. It’s usually efficient, making fresh compost for your garden within 3-6 months. Layer green and brown materials into the barrel. Add water if materials seem dry, add dry brown materials if things seem wet. Urea can help with decomposition, and a small amount of urine can act as a useful activator to get the breakdown started. About once a week, to once every two weeks, give the barrel a spin to mix the layers and help permeate the mixture with oxygen. Add additional moisture if the barrel dries out, but most of the time it won’t be necessary.

Monitor the barrel until the organic materials you initially added take on a brown, soil-like appearence and there are no large pieces of material left. Some materials, like non-crushed egg shells, or orange peels may not break down efficiently in this environment. Also, you don’t have worms in this environment, so it can take a bit longer to break down than a system that includes worms.

I like compost barrels specifically for small lots, and other situations where a larger compost system would be out of place, or might attract nesting critters.

The Three Pile Method:

Often made using homemade compost bins, the three pile or three bin method uses three open top and open bottomed bins to make compost. In the first bin, you layer your green and brown materials. This often includes sawdust, lots of grasses, and other outdoor materials due to the size of these bins.

After about six to ten weeks, when the initial compost heap has started to shrink, the first bin is forked and turned into the second bin. Use a pitchfork rather than a garden fork for this, it’s easier. The first bin can then be set up with fresh green material and fresh brown material to start a new compost pile. If you’re concerned about the heat of your compost, get a compost thermometer to help monitor and let you keep the pile in the ideal decomposition zone.

After another 6-10 weeks, the second bin is turned into the third bin, and the first bin is turned into the second. Sometimes people will aerate the bins during the waiting period, either with long poles, or with compost aerators. This helps the organic matter break down, and helps keep pockets of anaerobic microorganisms from forming. Most of a compost pile’s breakdown occurs from aerobic, or with air, decomposition and microorganisms. As long as your compost pile has a good ratio of brown and green materials and is turned or aerated every few weeks, there should be no odor. Odor is normally caused by a lack of air, or from adding materials like dairy products into the pile by accident.

When the third bin has a soil-like appearance it’s finished compost and is to be shoveled into your wheelbarrow and added to your garden. Compost can be used as a top dressing in any of your garden beds, plant containers, or in-ground garden beds.

The Compost Barrel:

The barrel is an on-ground combination of the three pile method and the compost turner. It typically is a black plastic barrel with a top opening, a few side openings for air, and a mesh or plastic screen on the bottom. Avoid setting the barrel on your lawn, a corner of your garden plot can work well. Also, if you have bindweed, or morning glory in the area, place the barrel in a location away from those weeds, their roots will invade the compost and consume the nutrients if they get the chance.

The barrel is good for larger numbers of vegetable scraps, vegetable peels, and food scraps compared to the three bin method. However, keeping some carbon-rich items, like browned grasses and small amounts of wood chips help turn the compost into black gold a lot faster. I’ve found that the barrel, due to it’s closed top and open bottom, needs watering more frequently than the three pile method or the tumbler method. It is also difficult to turn the barrel with a garden fork, and I normally end up poking the contents of the barrel with a long wooden stake to aerate it after adding nitrogen-rich items.  I prefer adding smaller pieces and more finally chopped material to the barrel, due to the difficulty of turning it. If using corn stalks as brown material, make sure they’re broken up and chopped.

To empty a compost barrel, pull it up and tip it over. Remove the top non-composted layer and shovel or scoop up the composted bottom portion of the barrel. Clean the bottom screen, and set up the barrel with fresh material mixed in with whatever non-composted material was on the top.

Lastly, if you have a wood stove, or are working with ashes, some wood ash can be added to your compost bin. I prefer making bone ash to add, as it has more minerals than plain wood ash. However, ash can have a pH changing effect if too much is used, so keep ash additions to your compost to a minimum. I would avoid adding charcoal ash from a grill if propellant was used to start it.

A Worm Bin:

A worm bin is a great way to make even more black gold and natural worm castings. Worms feed on mostly kitchen scraps, with a good side snack of dry grasses, hay, or other carbon rich material to keep their bed from getting too damp and waterlogged.

Start your worm-bin with a rubbermaid container with lots of air-holes drilled around the top half and some drainage holes in the bottom. Add a layer of loose wood chips to the bottom, this helps with drainage. Then add a layer of course shredded, dry, paper. A layer of soil over that for the worms to hide in is last. Add your worms, red wriggler worms are  the best for compost breakdown.

You can order red wriggler compost worms online, or catch some yourself. The best way to catch them, if they’re in your area, is with a bucket of mixed coffee grounds. Mix 50/50 coffee grounds and course soil into a small tin or bucket, and flip it upside down on the ground. Leave it through one or two rains, and then check to see what’s inside the bucket. If you have red wrigglers in your area, they’ll have come to eat the nitrogen rich coffee grounds. Transfer a handful or two to your set-up worm bin.

Once you have some worms, add your day’s kitchen scraps to the bin. These should be things like vegetable peelings, loose lettuce leaves, and other green materials. A few crushed eggshells are fine, and a small amount of coffee grounds. Don’t add more than 1/2 cup of ground coffee per day. Worms love mushroom ends and butts, so if you enjoy mushrooms don’t forget to feed the trimmings to the worms.

Feed the kitchen scraps on one side of the soil portion of your worm bin. Over time, the other side with be covered with brown crumbly worm castings. Scoop out the castings and if the bin seems damp or starting to smell a bit, add some grass, loose brown leaves, and other carbon rich materials to help balance the environment. Worms love both nitrogen rich and carbon rich materials.

Add your clean worm castings to your indoor potted plants, outdoor garden plants as a top dressing. Or use to make compost tea for a foliage fertilizer, or just as a watered in fertilizer too.

Other Reasons to Make Black Gold:

This is a great way to keep food scraps and garden waste out of your local landfill. While many municipalities now have programs to help with biodegradable materials, the programs still use landfill space. Keeping your biodegradable kitchen trash to make black gold for your garden, container plants, or even just for your trees, hedges, or bushes is awesome.

It’s a way to build your self-reliance. Keeping a pail for scraps under your sink, or in your freezer, is a way to build awareness for yourself, or your family, of the natural nutrient cycle. It’s also a way to help you avoid expensive, chemical fertilizer costs for indoor or outdoor plants.

Even if you don’t have space for an outdoor garden, containers and indoor gardening can help you increase your self-reliance and food security. Use a small worm bin, or small compost tumbler to help feed your indoor gardening or garden containers and be more confident in your gardening abilities.

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