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Composting: Maximize Your Garden’s Green Potential

The weather’s finally wonderful, and you’re working in the garden. You might think your green thumb gives you all the help you need, but there’s one way of making your garden both greener in color and more environmentally friendly: composting. Composting in your backyard will help your garden grow, benefit the environment, and take some strain off of your wallet.

Why you should compost:

Composting reproduces in your own garden the cycle of decay and fertilization that naturally happens in the forest. This natural decay of organic material, even if it’s just from your home, makes excellent organic fertilizer. Adding compost to your garden releases nutrients that spur plant growth and improve soil structure and health.

In addition to the gardening benefits, composting does wonders for the environment as a whole. Everything you compost is material that otherwise would’ve made it into the garbage, so the more you compost, the less waste your household produces. Compost can also replace costly and dangerous chemical fertilizers, benefitting the entire ecosystem surrounding your home and saving you money.

What you’ll need:

To get started composting, you probably won’t even have to purchase any tools, since all you need are typical household gardening devices. You’ll want a pitch fork for turning the heap, a shovel for adding the compost to your garden, and a cart for transporting the compost.

You’ll also need a container for the heap. The Garden of Oz goes into more detail about the advantages and disadvantages of each, but in brief, you can either use a closed or open container. What you do want, if possible, is two chambers, so that you don’t have to add new material to an already composting heap (which sets back the clock to the beginning of the process).

Of course, now you need to determine what goes in to your heap. The typical composition should be four parts “browns” to one part “greens.” Browns are primarily dry leaves but also include dried grass, straw, and small amounts of sawdust; greens are fresh grass, manure, weeds, and what you’d normally be putting in the trash: coffee grounds, leftover fruits and vegetables, and so on.

How to compost:

Now, two things that composting requires—space and time—are luxuries for many people (everyone has more than enough garbage, after all!). But done correctly, composting doesn’t take much space, and though the heap will need a few weeks to decompose, this involves little of your own time.

Make a big pile so that you have enough mass to create heat, but shred the ingredients, because that creates more and smaller particles for the microbes to consume. Also, be sure to turn your compost to improve the consistency and health of the compost.

Composting is simple, productive, and beneficial to both you and the environment. A few last tips: four parts browns to one part greens is a guideline, but always err on the side of having too much browns, because that will just mean decomposition takes longer; too much greens, and it might not decompose at all. And use at least 1 cubic foot of raw materials to ensure your pile gets going.

Happy composting! We’d love to hear about your progress in the comments, or see pictures of your garden on our Facebook page. 

Don’t forget, if you get messy while you’re gardening, our spring stain removal tips could save your clothes.

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