How to Start A Compost?

!±8± How to Start A Compost?

Composting is difficult. The wonderful truth is you couldn't stop stuff from decomposing if you tried.

A good compost bin or pile will decompose items quickly. A poor one will still decompose items, but slowly. Consider your location carefully. You don't want a compost to send smelly air downwind to your house on a hot day, but you also don't want to have to walk far from your kitchen to put things into it on a cold or rainy day. If your compost is located to receive sun, the contents will break down faster than if you put it in a shady place.

A compost can be made with metal fencing or wood pallets, or you can purchase a commercial compost bin through a garden center. Improved features on a compost bin might include a lid to prevent animal entry, a black exterior to improve solar gain and speed up the compost process, vents also to speed up the process, and a trap door at the bottom so you can pull out the rich, finished compost to spread around your garden beds. This last feature can be very nice as then you won't have to muck about from the top with a shovel to get to the useable stuff at the bottom.

In your kitchen keep some kind of container with a handle to collect compost. Some gallon ice cream tubs come with a lid and handle and are great for this purpose. A lid helps prevent fruit flies in summer. When anyone in your house chops vegetables, peels an orange, etc, put it in the compost bucket. Once a day carry the contents to your compost bin.

Into the compost bin you can put vegetable and fruit parts, pasta water, spoiled food, sour milk or fuzzy yogurt, coffee grounds, egg shells, citrus rinds and cantaloupe rinds surprisingly break down quite well. When you are cleaning up your yard you can put in healthy leaves.

What you don't want in your compost: meat, bones, kitty litter (even if you use clay litter, this would create a health hazard), nut shells, those little sticky labels they put on fruits (watch out for them), look out for accidentally dumping in plastic wrappers (happens more often than you might think), sticks, any parts of pine trees, green walnuts, diseased or unwanted plants from your yard.