How To Make Your Own Compost And Garden Mulch

Glenda Smith, a home gardener, shares her knowledge of composting with us.

Glenda Smith - Guest Blog
16 October 2015

 

Everyone should compost their green waste. It makes economic and environmental sense.    

There is a method to suit every household, whether you live in a house, townhouse or apartment.  

Composting Methods:

• Lidded Bin System
• Tumbler
• Worm Farm
• Hot Composting
• Fermentation Bucket or Bokashi Bucket

Top Tip:  
To save time, keep a sturdy, lidded container beside your sink, under it or near your kitchen tidy-bin, to visibly remind your household to compost waste.  Empty regularly into your chosen composting method.

Lidded Bin System:
Purchase a compost bin from a hardware garden centre or repurpose something UV-stable that you already own, e.g. a disused wheelie-bin, garbage can or plant pot with the base cut out.  Cover with a lid to shelter worms, keep your system moist and inhibit vermin.  

Gardener’s Secret:   
If you have a large household, and you fill the compost bin quickly, use 2-3 bins in rotation.

Compost Tumbler:  
If you want fast breakdown for your leaves and grass clippings to kill the grass seed, this is your best method.  It’s also perfectly sized for small gardens and courtyards. You aerate the compost each time you turn it, which hastens decompositon.  

Worm Farm:
Worms convert your kitchen scraps and garden waste into compost.  You can purchase readymade farms or make your own by repurposing a bath.  The worm castings (aka ‘worm poo’) make excellent fertiliser.  

‘Worm wee’ can be drained and bottled, weekly, to mix with water for use as liquid fertiliser.  Gardeners will pay up to $2.50 a Litre, if you want to make money from your waste.    

Top Tip:  
Cover your worm farm with a natural, breathable fabric to keep your worms dark, active, cool and moist.

Hot Composting:
This is best suited to larger backyards in evergreen-dominant areas.  Create a 3-bay structure from a commercial pack or create your own by repurposing old pallets.

Fill one bay per season using a mix of green and brown waste.  Green waste is things that breakdown quickly, like your kitchen scraps, garden waste and fresh grass clippings.  Brown waste is materials like dried out leaves, larger tree prunings, straw, cardboard & paper, which are slower to breakdown.  The ratio should be around one part brown to four parts green.

As you add to each bay, each bay-layer will be at different stages of decomposition, so each week you need to blend and aerate these mixtures with a garden fork or aerating stick.

Depending on the season, It takes 8 weeks or so before each bay’s mixture decomposes enough to use as garden mulch.    

Gardener’s Secret:   
If your mixture starts looking dry, hose it until it is moist, to keep the fermentation process going.

Gardener’s Secret:   
Don’t plant new seedlings into fresh compost that is still hot.  This burns delicate roots.

Fermentation or Bokashi Bucket:
This is the ultimate method for small yards, townhouses and apartments, as the bucket permanently sits on your kitchen bench.  
You can add ‘anything that has lived’ (even most of the No-Nos below) into your bucket, including protein and oil.  Sprinkle with fermentation granules daily. Fermentation takes about 2-3 weeks, yielding a liquid which you can dilute with water to fertilise your plants. The residue is full of nutrients, microbes and enzymes that can added to pot plants.  

What can you compost? 
Anything that has grown, like:

• Fruit, vegetables and their peelings and the water you used when washing them
• Nuts and their shells
• Tree and lawn trimmings;  even sawdust
• Eggs and eggshells (smash for quicker composting results)
• Coffee grounds and tealeaves.  Teabags take a long time to break down so only add to your compost bin if you take a long time to fill your bin.
• Shredded Newspapers, non-shiny paper and cardboard
• Weeds that don’t contain a bulb  
• Hair, nail-clippings and pet fur
• Waste water from cooked vegetables and pasta
• Empty your kitchen sink strainer into your bin
• Crumbs leftover in packets

No-Nos:

• Anything proteinaceous like meat and dairy (fish is okay)
• Large meat bones.  Small ones are okay as they contain calcium but take a long time to breakdown.  Consider burying them
• Citrus fruit and peel
• Sick and Pest infested plants, fruit and vegetables
• Pet excrement (not even in the Bokashi!)

Top Tip:
If it is too cold, wet or you are just too time-poor to go outside each day to empty your kitchen compost bin, keep a lidded container in the freezer into which you can add, and empty when full.  

Gardener’s Secret:   
If your compost mixture stinks, it has become too acidic.  Add a handful of agricultural lime, dolomite, or even barbecue wood-ash.

I hope these composting tips give you the confidence to compost your household’s waste.

Happy Gardening!

If you would like to read more from Glenda you can visit her blog: Growing Snowballs

If you would like to write a guest blog, further information can be found here: Earn Yourself a $50 HOSELINK Voucher

 

N.B. This article has been written for Australian gardens. If you're reading this from around the world, we do hope you've found it a useful stepping stone for your own further research.

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