For the Love of Compost!

Spring is in the air, the bee's are buzzing, the birds are twitter-pated, time to put some love back into those garden beds!

Every spring where I live you can smell the faint aroma of manure as the farmers a few km away are spraying their fields with fertilizer. My oldest daughter complains, but for me it's a reminder that I need to put some nutrients back into my own garden. I don't have piles of manure at my disposal, nor can afford to buy bags and bags of manure from my local nursery. The fact is, I needed to be able to fertilize my garden as inexpensively as possible (aka FREE), so what better way than to utilize the waste my family generates anyway through composting!

Compost is simply decayed organic matter. That's it. Combine it with your garden soil or surround the base of your plants with it and the soil quality in your garden will sky-rocket.

Composting is easy and requires little space, some people even compost indoors.

Compost is easy to make and utilizes organic matter that you usually have a ready supply of anyway; green matter (ie, grass clippings, food waste), and brown matter (leaves, straw, egg cartons).

This is my composting system....

In my dreams....In my REALITY, my compost bin is a cracked freebie that someone was tossing.

It may not be much to look at, but I was SO excited to get my hands on this bin. I had been trying to come up with a DIY bin solution for a few weeks that could be tucked in a corner where my toddler may not notice it (wishful thinking, she spied this sucker from a mile away), so nabbing this one for free saved me all that time and energy, and as far as I'm concerned the cracks are just extra ventilation!

The girls helped me set it up and we made quick work of our first installment.

We started with a thin layer of small twigs and rose bush clippings to keep our material up off the ground a little to allow air flow.

For BROWN matter, we tore up some egg cartons we had been saving and tossed them in. Other examples we cold have used are; straw, wood chips, dry leaves, tea bags or sawdust. Even paper towel, cardboard and paper can be tossed in as brown material. These materials add carbon to the would-be fertilizer and serves to add bulk and air to flow into the decomposting material.

Next Baby D tossed in some GREEN material, important because it is high in nitrogen, green material can consist of grass clippings and weeds from the yard and some vegetable waste from the kitchen, like coffee grounds and other food scraps. Be generous with your greens, they supply the most nutrients to your compost!

We topped it all off with some water from the hose, and gave it a stir with a pitchfork (Swell L said it was like tossing a giant, gross salad).

I'll turn it every week or so, being sure to add brown and green material equally along the way and by next spring I should have dark, earthy compost, rich in nutrients to feed our little garden!

My daughter added this cautionary sign to remind us all of the food-waste to avoid.

When added to the compost bin, meats and other protein rich food waste will begin to rot, attracting flies and other wildlife. You wouldn't want to surprise a skunk looking for a snack one morning, so leave those bones OUT of the compost bin!

One of the greatest things about composting (despite that it's FREE fertilizer), is that it's a great way to engage your kids in the garden. My girls loved being a part of the process and it gave me an opportunity to teach Swell L something. Add the obvious environmental benefits of composting and I would say there really are NO down sides.

Have you come up with a composting system in your backyard? Comment below!