Easy Composting Method The Best Time To Start Is Now!

Every year I see people burning and bagging leaves, are you one of those people? If so check out this easy and basic process for composting that we have found to work very well.

We stopped giving away our free fertilizer a few years ago and we will never turn back. We now do not throw away any organic material from our yard or kitchen unless it is somehow toxic or gone really, really bad. All of our leaves, sticks, sawdust, chicken manure, food scraps, cardboard, compostable paper products, and much more all end up being processed right back into our garden beds. Is there any other way? I cant imagine going out to the store and buying fertilizers and compost that some company is selling back to the same people that left their yard waste at the curb, doesnt that seem silly?



There are many resources out there on what you should compost and how much of each type of item to put in the pile or bin or whatever you have setup. I go with a simple and very general rule of thumb. We add about 75% carbon material (leaves, saw dust, cardboard, paper, wood chips, etc.). This is the base to any good compost and handily this also makes up the majority of most peoples yard waste (remember that giant pile of leaves you had to rack up last year?). The next ingredient is nitrogen materials (chicken manure, vegetables, plant materials, last years jack-o-lanterns, and all of our kitchen waste). Just to be clear you cannot add any leftovers or meat products to your compost, only things that at one time grew from the ground in some way.

Now that you have all those goodies mixed together the only thing left to do is to wait and turn it over as much as you can remember. I mix mine up about once per week. This allows air to get into the pile and for the bacteria to get to work doing their thing. Many people suggest watering the pile as well but up here in Michigan I would not do that unless it was a drought. I might pour a bucket of nitrogen rich aquaponics water on it if that was needed.

We have found the best way to get started and make sure that our lazy genes dont take over is to keep a small container on the counter in your kitchen for scraps and one just outside your door to move them into every day or two. We use an old mixing bowl inside and an old trash can outside. Once per week or so I take the trash can back to the "pile" and dump it and stir it up with a pitchfork.

If things go well and the pile gets cooking you should be cooked down to useable soil in about 60 days or so depending on your weather. This soil has everything that your plants, flowers, vegetables, or anything else needs to grow. If you do this right you should not need to buy soil, compost, manure, or fertilizers for your garden.

I hope this encourages someone to get started and save some food scraps from ending up in a landfill for goodness sakes!


~The SSL Family Dad

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Fall Composting Where the Best Soil Begins

When should I start composting? What do I add to the pile? How long does it take? Can I add.....? I get composting questions all the time from friends and family; my answer is always the same - Start with leaves! In this video I talk about our method of starting our compost pile each fall. We usually get enough to let it cook down twice per year which equals a lot of fresh homemade compost for our gardens.

I have talked about this before in my fall composting with a string trimmer post and also in last years easy composting method video. Good compost starts with leaves! they are all around us in the fall time and unless you live in the deep south, the jungle, or a desert you have plenty of leaves to use. Even if you dont want to rake up your own leaves there are probably plenty of your neighbors who are bagging up theirs and leaving them at the curb for the city to pick-up (if your city does that kind of thing). The bottom line is this, get as many leaves as you can because they are going to be the base of the compost you will use throughout the entire year.


Once I have all of our leaves raked up I start carting them to the compost pile in the back corner of our lot. It is nothing special, just a few cheap metal posts, some garden wire fencing, and a pile of leaves and food scraps in the middle. As I am carting the leaves to the pile I also take care of cleaning up the garden beds of all dead and dying vegetable plants from the summer and layer those on the pile in-between loads of the leaves. This creates a layers of alternating carbon material (leaves) and nitrogen material (green plants and food scraps). Once I have all of the leaves in I top it off with our food scraps from the last couple of months that have been saved as the compost from the summer finished up.

This is all that needs to be done for the fall. Just let the pile site and you can add your food scraps to it all winter long. If you prefer you can also cover the pile as many like to do but I have found that to be largely unnecessary.

In the spring time you need to start turning the pile with a pitch fork every couple of weeks and get it cooking down. As the temps rise it will start to reduce in size and after about 60 days you will be ready to add this fresh homemade compost to amend your gardens.

There should be no need to ever, and I mean ever, buy fertilizer for an everyday garden. Compost can provide all of the macro and micro nutrients that any plants need. Give it a try, youll be happily surprised!

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Hoedown by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Artist: http://audionautix.com/

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Fall Composting With a String Trimmer

Leaves, leaves, leaves! There is one sure thing about the fall and that is there is no shortage of leaves! Every year I watch people rake up all of their leaves and either burn them or put them at the curb to be hauled off by the city. This is a resource that we should all be using in our yards, gardens, and flowerbeds. It seems very silly to spend all that time and effort collecting leaves from your yard just to get rid of them! And then on top of that, when spring time comes around, we will them go out and buy fertilizer and compost to put in our gardens! Leaves and grass clippings are one of the most abundant resources for a good compost pile that most everybody has (unless you live in the southwest, I suppose).

This post is not as much about how to compost but more about how to deal with leaves and how important they are to your compost pile or bin. Using leaves as the primary resource for you compost is important but it is not as easy as just throwing them into the pile and calling it a day. It is necessary to shred the leaves up as best as possible to prevent the leaves from matting down into a layer that will be hard to move and will not compost.

What else is needed for the compost to start working? Well, the best thing to do is to add some nitrogen material such as kitchen scraps to get the process going. It is also necessary to turn the pile as often as you can to keep air moving around throughout. Even in the coldest months the pile will begin to compost although slowly. As the weather warms turn the pile more and more and by early summer you will have composted all of those leaves into rich dark soil. This soil is full of just about everything that your garden could possible desire.

Another tip if you have a small yard, just offer to rake your neighbors yards for them, they would love it and you will have rich garden soil in the spring!

TED talk on composting:

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