Composting For Organic Gardening

Any garden will produce a certain amount of waste and in as such it make perfect sense to recycle as much as possible. The best way of doing this is by composting as much organic waste as possible, and when you consider that production of this waste has taken a certain amount of goodness from the soil it makes sense to put it back.

What is Composting

Composting is a process of decomposing and recycle the waste generated from garden and house and used as fertilizers. Composting is done in bins, the waste has been filled and left to be decomposed and is added to the soil. Composting is one of the most important step of organic gardening.

There are many types of composting bins available with many of them constructed from plastic and this seems a bit at odds with the spirit of composting, much better to opt for ones made from wood even better to construct your own using old timber. It is very easy to construct your own compost bin.

How to make a Compost

In the average garden almost all plant material can be used to produce your own rich compost you can also add:

• All organic kitchen waste including egg shells, however do not use cooked waste
• Coffee grounds are ideal to chuck on your compost heap and this will save them from clogging up your sink
• Shredded paper from a paper shredder can be added as a layer this will help give you a drier compost and help avoid a soggy mess
• When placing your garden waste on to your compost heap it is always better to create layers of brown waste and green waste
• It of no use to just dump loads of grass cuttings in in one go as this will produce a sludge
• Take smaller soft wood twigs, leaves weeds etc and create a layer and then add grass cutting and try to always repeat this sort of mix
• It is also good to add a little garden soil as this will provide organisms that will greatly aid the breakdown of all your organic material
• It is also good practice to ‘turn’ the contents of your compost heap say once a month this will introduce air and also aid the correct high temperature that help create the death of weed seed.

In general it will take about  6 months to a year to get your first compost and this should be rather dark and like a fine tilth. If the compost is wet and smelly you need to look at adding more brown dry material like leaves and thin twigs.

Your end product of rich compost can be used in several  ways , if you really want to improve the soil structure then dig the compost in at about a spade’s depth. It may also be used as a mulch that will help retain moisture and keep weeds down. The other nice thing about compost is that it will encourage a good amount of worms that in turn will improve soil structure and also enrich your garden.

There are on the market several products that claim to speed up the composting of your garden waste, however it is questionable if there is a need for these products as a compost heap that is maintained and looked after should work just fine.

Author’s Bio: The article is written by Anurag Agarwal who is blogging enthusiastic and writes professional content at Plants and Trees online.