Making Compost
by John Yazo
Compost has many benefits for your garden. It can be used as an amendment to the soil, used as a mulch or as an organic fertilizer.
Compost is the decomposed product of organic materials.Composting is the reproduction of natures way of breaking down organic materials as it does in the forests, grasslands, meadows and gardens. Plant and animals live and die in the woods and are eaten by bugs and small organisms that live in the soil.
This decomposing process can be sped up by composting. Knowing the optimum condition of moisture, heat, air and material to produce compost you can speed up the composting process. When speeding up the composting process it creates heat that kill off plant diseases and weed seeds in the pile.
Any organic material can be composed. You just need the proper ratio of brown material ( carbon-rich) and green material ( nitrogen-rich).
Examples of brown material are dried leaves, straw and wood chips. Green materials such as grass clippings or leftover vegetable scraps and peels from your kitchen.
Achieving the best mix is something that can only be learned by experience, there is no exact science. To give a basic idea to start a 1 to 1 ratio of brown and green material is a good starting point. Then watch the pile, if the pile is wet and slimy there is too much green material and if it decomposes slow the there is to much brown material.
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