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HOME COMPOSTING

Home composting is an environmentally friendly activity and a great way to reduce your household waste. Learn about the advantages of home composting and what items you can recycle.

Crocks for Home Composting
With daily headlines and all the talk about environmental conservation and proper garbage disposal, home composting is at the forefront, along with fuel efficiency and water conservation. For most people, home composting is one of the most environmentally beneficial activities to get involved in.

In the US alone, garden and food wastes make up 30% of the waste stream. What this means is that a large portion of your garbage can be recycled and reused as fertilizer.

Instead of dumping your families’ biodegradable waste into the garbage bin and sending it off to landfill, you can compost it and divert it on to your own garden in the form of valuable humus, which is a wonderful food for your plants and flowers. However, collecting kitchen scraps shouldn’t detract from your kitchen décor. This sleek, ceramic Kitchen Compost Crock is attractive enough to keep on the kitchen counter, so there is no need to hide it under the sink.

Let it RotIt’s common knowledge that home composting provides essential additives to the soil, it not only serves as a fertilizer, but also buffers the pH levels and helps retain precious water in the garden where it’s needed. Also by keeping the surface cool, it aids in the prevention of soil erosion. This is beneficial to your pocket too, as by adding this humus you will have no need to buy topsoil again. By home composting all your families’ biodegradable waste you will have endless supplies of the most valuable fertilizer you can feed to your plants, all for free.

Aside from these advantages, experts are unanimous that home composting is a good lesson for young and old alike to learn the importance of conservation, and serves as a valuable tool to describe the cycle of life and the connection between man, plants and animals.

Often, gardening will prompt children to ask questions about how you achieve results when you are attending your veggies or flowers, you can impress on them that home composting offers a natural alternative to chemical fertilizers, enriches the soil, and how this benefits your garden plants, at the same time helping the environment by reducing the waste stream.

There are 4 basic necessities for home composting – nitrogen, carbon, air and water, so how do we get started, what can be recycled? Anything that’s lived before is a rule of thumb.

Greens – Nitrogen rich materials, rapidly decomposing

  • Fruit, vegetable scraps
  • Raw table scraps
  • Grass clippings – spread in layers to prevent bulking
    • Scraps for Home Composting
  • Flower cuttings & garden plants
  • Young green weeds – as long as they have not gone to seed
  • Chicken manure – speeds up process
  • Green hay – spread in layers
  • Crushed eggshells
  • Vacuum cleaner dust
  • Tea leaves or bags
  • Coffee grounds

Browns – Carbon rich materials, slow to decompose
    newspaper

  • Cardboard– cut up
  • Newspaper and paper – avoid glossy paper
  • Leaves
  • Sawdust – spread in layers to prevent bulking
  • Wood shavings
  • Woody prunings – cut up small to
  • Hedge clippings
  • Fallen leaves
  • Pine needles – acidic, use sparingly
  • Clean wood ash – sprinkle lightly, it is alkaline so can help adjust the pH

Do not use diseased or seed infested weeds, bones, meat, banana, orange or peach peel, pet droppings, or anything inorganic like metal, plastic or glass.

To get your home composting project off to a quick start you can add a compost activator which contains bugs which will eat and break down any organic material. Also adding garden soil will do the same.

Heat will speed up the home composting process so place your pile or bin in the sun. Chop or shred larger items so the bacteria can break them down quicker. Worm farms are an alternative way of home composting and turning kitchen waste into fantastic fertilizer.