Composting Methods
Composting is a method of recycling materials from your landscape and from your home to create a rich, nutritious additive for your soil and gardens. There are a few different types of composting; ways to compost that will make your life easy by recycling basic materials. The first thing to remember in composting is that a mixture of two to one, brown materials to green materials is what is needed to make your composting pile decompose fastest.

Posted Thursday, April 6, 2006

Double heap composting is an effective method of building your composting pile. You slowly add your leftovers, your garden scraps, and materials from your landscape as you get them. This type of composting pile is only going to stand about three feet tall. Beside the first pile, you are going to start a second pile.

The second pile is going to be building while your first pile is decomposing. You can take a scoop from the first pile that is already decomposed and add it to the other pile. This is going to speed up the decomposing of the second pile.

Hot composting is a method of building your composting pile all at one time. The larger pile of compost is going to become hot in the middle as it begins to decompose. The trick here is to have lots of green types of materials, rich in nitrogen. Add green grass clippings to your soil as you cut your grass to speed up the process.

The temperature in the hot pile is usually over 120 degrees, with this process working best during the hottest times of the summer. The higher temperatures are going to kill off the weeds, any little bugs and insects crawling through, and any diseases that can be on the plants or materials that you added to your pile.

You will use your pitchfork or a shovel to turn the pile every week or so, to keep the center of the pile hot and to work the heat throughout the pile. The hot compost pile can be as large as you want. You can turn it with machinery when the pile gets to be too big. The process continually makes new, fresh nutrients that you can add to your soil.

What should you do if your compost pile never seems to get hot enough and therefore is not decomposing? You can do a few things actually. Add a few buckets of water. The moisture on the compost pile turn as you work the pile. The larger the pile the more water you should add. Adding water once a week during the hottest portions of your summer will ensure your compost pile keeps on burning.

You can have a loose compost pile, where you just keep adding materials to the same location or you can create a box that will hold all of your compost materials. Using a few pieces of wood and some chicken type wire you can build a box for just a few dollars. There are also barrels and containers that are used to hold all types of materials to keep it hot and so you can compost smaller amounts if you want.