You could say we have an obsession with compost around here. And why wouldn’t we? It’s the perfect organic soil amendment – nutrient-rich and filled with microbial life – that we can make ourselves, for free.

When you want to give your plants the very best in liquid organic fertilizers, you better believe we’re going with compost tea!

Compost tea is the essence of compost in liquid form– an infusion of water with beneficial microbes, nutrients, and humic acids that feeds plants, enhances the health of the soil, and promotes a vibrant and diverse ecosystem.

The traditional way to make compost tea is by soaking compost, animal manure, or worm castings in water and letting it steep for days or weeks at a time. A passive method, non-aerated teas have been used for centuries to nourish crops.

A more modern approach is to make your compost tea into a supercharged brew.

What is Aerated Compost Tea?

Non-aerated compost teas have a very long history of use that stretches back to ancient times. But with science, improved technology – and microscopes! – we now have a better understanding of the teeny organisms that inhabit the brew.

Since they are passively steeped and stirred only occasionally, the water in non-aerated teas are stagnant. Without oxygen flowing through the liquid, the beneficial organisms that initially populated the compost will die off. The tea will begin to smell awful as it becomes active with anaerobic bacteria. There’s concern that such a mixture can potentially harbor harmful pathogens like E. Coli and Salmonella.

But by introducing oxygen to the process, we can make a better, faster, and safer compost tea.

Actively aerated compost tea (AACT or ACT) involves oxygenating the water with an air pump to preserve the beneficial bacteria, yeasts, and fungal filaments within the compost. The addition of a nutrient during the brewing process encourages these microorganisms to multiply.

Instead of waiting for weeks for the compost to steep, with AACT you can brew it up and use it on your plants in a day or so. And since the air is always flowing, aerated compost tea has zero odor.

5 Reasons to Aerate Your Compost Tea

Compost teas that are continuously oxygenated throughout the brewing process will be teeming with life. When used on plants, it’s a powerful mixture that fortifies their defenses, improves nutrient uptake, and encourages robust growth.

Although spreading compost around the garden in its solid and friable state does all those wonderful things too, there are a few reasons you might want to take the extra step of making a bubbling brew of compost tea.

1. It stretches a lot farther than compost

Compost is a gardener’s best friend because it’s so dang useful. Fertility, moisture retention, pH buffering, and disease resistance are just some of the amazing attributes of compost.

Whether you make it yourself or purchase certified compost, there’s only so much of the good stuff to go around. But compost tea offers a way to stretch your compost budget much, much further.

To make a 5-gallon batch of robust compost tea, you only need about 2 cups’ worth of your highest quality compost. A 35-pound bag of compost will yield roughly 140 gallons of compost tea.

As a liquid, a little aerated compost tea goes a long way. The general guidance is to apply 20 gallons of compost tea per acre, so 5-gallons is more than enough to dose the average backyard veggie plot.

Some folks like to apply it weekly, while others find you only need to dose crops with compost tea twice or thrice a season.

2. It’s got more microbes

A well-made brew of aerated compost tea can house 4 times as many microbes as friable compost.

Just as we turn the compost pile to increase oxygen, AACT does a similar thing to the water. Agitation and air creates a liquid culture for aerobic microorganisms to thrive. Essentially, it’s a petri dish in a bucket.

It works like this: compost seeds the brew with microbial life, airflow supplies the oxygen these microbes need to survive, and the addition of a nutrient causes them to multiply by the billions.

A single food source – a small amount of alfalfa meal, unsulfured molasses, kelp meal, or fish hydrolysate – is all that’s needed to kick off a rampant feeding cycle.

As one type of bacteria consumes the supplied nutrient and reproduces, another microbe will arrive to feed on the original bacteria. As these microbes grow and multiply, other microbes will soon follow to feed on them.

Each new microbial inhabitant attracts more microorganisms to the tea, building out a diverse environment for flagellates, ciliates, and other soil-friendly protozoa.

3. It allows for quicker nutrient uptake

Humusy compost delivers fertility to the soil, but does so in a slow and steady fashion. As a gentle amendment, the nutrients in compost are gradually released into the earth every time it rains or the garden is watered.

Aerated compost tea is more like a fast-acting liquid fertilizer.

In freshly brewed tea, the minerals and nutrients from the compost have already been dissolved into the liquid. With no need to wait for water to move through the soil before nutrients can be dispersed, compost tea works quickly to replenish depleted soils and boost plant growth.

Aerated compost teas are jam-packed with microbes too. These tiny guys will rapidly convert the nutrients into an ionized form, which makes them available to plants.

Always remember, we never really directly fertilize plants; it’s the microorganisms in the soil that we’re feeding so that they can supply nutrients to plants.

4. It’s easier to apply

Admittedly, dark and crumbly compost is a delight to work with – it’s so soft and fluffy and earthy. But having your compost in liquid form makes it all the easier to apply it around the garden.

Transferred to a watering can, compost tea is fully portable and mobile. Use it to spot-treat individual plants or drench entire beds.

Aerated compost tea feeds the soil, but it also works beautifully on plants themselves. Contributing to the foliar microbiome – the community of microorganisms that live on the surfaces of leaves – AACT will likewise spur plant growth when applied with a pump sprayer.

Research is still ongoing but there are indications that foliar treatments with compost tea may also help plants resist disease. It’s theorized that the billions of benefical microbes inhabiting the foliage will outnumber and outcompete nasty pathogens like powdery mildew.

Compost tea is a potent plant tonic, yet it’s mild enough that it won’t burn plant roots or leaves. It doesn’t need to be diluted, and you can’t really over-apply it.

That said, it doesn’t take much aerated compost tea give your crops a real shot in the arm – just pour a pint or two of compost tea around the base of each plant. 

5. It’s fun to make

Indeed, aerating your compost tea is a fun little project!

It’s really simple to set up an aeration system for brewing compost tea. With a few basic supplies, you can become a producer of high-quality 100% organic liquid fertilizer from the comfort of home, saving money and practicing self-sufficiency. And frankly, I find that thrilling.

Rewards are quick and you’ll have finished and ready-to-use liquid fertilizer by the next day. From start to finish, the total brewing time is just 24 to 36 hours.

The brewing process is quite fascinating as well. The darkening waters and rigorous bubbling makes the whole thing feel more like we’re doing alchemy. Well, we sort of are – we’re creating an elixir of life!

How to Make Actively Aerated Compost Tea

Supplies You’ll Need:

• High quality compost – worm castings, well-rotted animal manure, or hot compost
• Microbe nutrient source – organic alfalfa meal, unsulfured molasses, fish hydrolysate, kelp meal, seaweed extract, or oat flour
• 5 gallon bucket(s) – made from food-grade plastic
• Commercial-grade air pump – I use the EcoPlus ECOair 1.
• Air stones – 4” x 2” like these.
• Airline tubing – 4 mm diameter
• Steeping bags – use nut milk bags, burlap, an old pillowcase, or several layers of cheesecloth
• Twine

Before each new brewing session, you’ll want to make sure all the items that come into contact with the compost tea are freshly sanitized. Wash the buckets, air stones, airline tubing, and tea bags with 3% hydrogen peroxide to avoid cross-contaminating your brew.

Step 1 – Fill the Buckets with Dechlorinated Water

Set up your compost brewing station in a sheltered spot, out of direct sunlight. It should be warm out, but not too hot – microbe growth is most successful in temperatures between 55°F and 85°F (13°C and 29°C).

Fill the buckets, about 2 inches from the brim, with clean water that contains no chlorine or chloramine. As disinfectants, these chemicals are deadly to the kinds of microorganisms that we definitely want in the finished compost tea.

Rainwater is best, well water is good, but city water would need to be treated to neutralize the chlorine and chloramine chemicals. Methods for removing both at once include reverse osmosis, filtering your water with catalytic carbon, or adding a few drops of aquarium water conditioner.

Step 2 – Prep Your Compost Tea Bags

In passive teas, you can just dump the compost right into the water. In aerated teas, using a tea bag to hold the compost is a practical necessity.

The tea sack fabric should be fine enough to keep silt and sediment out of the final product. It also needs to be permeable so the compost makes good contact with water.

Most importantly, keeping your water clear of debris prevents the air stone from clogging up and slowing down your air flow.

Measure out roughly 2 cups of compost and drop it into your tea bag. Prep one tea bag for every 5 gallon bucket.

Step 3 – Add the Microbe Nutrient

There are many different nutrient sources to choose from, and our beneficial microbes aren’t picky!

Anything sugary, starchy, or high in nitrogen will feed at least one type of bacteria. You could use blackstrap molasses, natural sugarcane, maple syrup, fruit juice, oat flour, kelp meal, or alfalfa meal.

Add 2 tablespoons of your chosen nutrient to the brew. For grains and powders, add it to the bag so the bits don’t gum up the air stone.

If you’re using a syrup or liquid nutrient, feel free to pour it directly into the water.

Close up the tea sacks tightly. Keep the bags suspended above the bubbler by tying them to the bucket handles with twine.

Step 4 – Assemble the Aerator

Next, hook up the air pump to the air stones.

Connect one end of the airline tubing to the nozzle of the air stone. Insert the other end into the air outlet from the air pump.

This air pump has 6 outlets for air flow, each controlled with a small valve. There could be six buckets of compost tea brewing at a time – but for today, we only need two.

Step 5 – Dunk and Steep the Tea Bags

Now, for the fun part – steep the tea bag in the bucket and watch as the clear water becomes a darker and darker shade of brown.

Lift the bag up and down several times until the liquid becomes a rich chocolatey hue.

Step 6 – Fire up the Aerator

Lower an air stone into the bottom of each bucket, positioning it in the center, below the suspended tea bag.

Move your air pump to an elevated surface. Oxygen will flow more efficiently when the pump is higher than the water level in the buckets.

Now we’re ready to fire up the air pump.

What you want to see is a lively churn. The flow of oxygen through the water needs to be powerful enough to create a roiling boil. The water surface should be active and agitated, with lots of bubbles.

If your aerator setup produces a light simmer or slow burble, you might need to invest in a more powerful air pump and air stone combo. Alternatively, try placing two air stones in one bucket to kick up the air flow.

As it bubbles away, check in on it periodically. If you notice the air flow has slowed after a few hours, lift the air stone and give it a good scrubbing before setting it back down in the bucket.

Step 7 – Let it Bubble for 24 to 36 Hours

After a day or so of roiling, the surface of the compost tea is covered in a thick foam of bubbles. And although a little detritus escaped the bags, it wasn’t enough to clog the air stones.

Don’t be tempted to let the compost tea continue to brew past the 36-hour mark. At this point, the tea has peaked. The nutrients we added at the start have been all gobbled up and only one type of bacteria will come to dominate the brew. Rather than a lively microbiome, the compost tea would become a monoculture, and we’d lose out on the whole point of this exercise – microbial diversity!

When your tea is ready to harvest, unplug the air pump and remove the air stones from the buckets.

Step 8 – Squeeze Out the Tea Bags

Lift your tea bags out of the brew and give them a good squeeze. Press and wring out as much of that lively elixir into the bucket as you can.

Snip the twine and open up the tea bag. Inside, you’ll find some mushy compost tea dregs.

The spent compost still has value in the garden. Spread it around as a soil topdressing or toss it back into your composter.

Step 9 – Use Your Compost Tea in the Garden Right Away

There will be no dilly-dallying with aerated compost tea!

The shelf life of the brew is quite short. It takes about four hours for the available oxygen in the liquid to become exhausted. Left longer than that, the still compost tea will become anaerobic.

Because you can’t store it and save it for later, it’s wise to use up all your compost tea at once in a single application.

The best time to dose crops with aerated tea is during in the morning or evening hours. Avoid applying it under strong sunlight, as UV rays kill microbes.

After you’ve nourished your green friends down to the last drop, give all your brewing tools and equipment a thorough cleaning with soapy water. Rinsed and dried, they will be good to go for your next batch of aerated compost tea.

The post How to Brew Aerated Compost Tea (& 5 Reasons Why You Should) appeared first on Rural Sprout.

When I first started gardening in earnest, my learning zeal was as high as the leggy tomatoes I was growing. I was humble enough to know that I didn’t know much, so I’d devour one book a week on the topic of organic gardening. 

Composting was the one thing that baffled me the most.

The stiff and didactical explanations in some of these books triggered unpleasant flashbacks to my eighth-grade chemistry teacher.  She talked at us rather than to us and didn’t care if we understood as long as she’d said her bit. You need this much nitrogen and this much oxygen at this high a temperature. It can’t be too dry or too wet or too compact or too aerated. 

Then one day, on a visit to my mother-in-law’s, I saw her taking a bowl of vegetable peelings to her veggie patch; I followed. She dug a hole in the ground and just dumped the scraps in. 

“What are you doing?” I asked, bewildered as she covered up the hole with dirt.

“Composting straight in the garden. It’s how my mother used to do it.”

This was one of those gardening lightbulb moments that will stay with me forever. 

What is composting in place?

And more importantly, why did none of the gardening books I had been reading mention it as a possibility? My mother-in-law’s stunning, mature garden was all the proof I needed that this method of composting worked. 

When we’re composting in place (also called composting in situ), we’re cutting out the middleman and putting the plant material straight into the ground. In this scenario, that middle man just happens to be the traditional compost pile, or its fancier version, the three-bin compost system. 

We’re burying the veggie scraps in the ground so that the underground worms and bacteria have direct access to decompose it. In the process, they also enrich our garden soil. 

5 Reasons to Try Composting in Place

Composting in place works particularly well in a few scenarios. 

1. If you’re gardening in a small space and don’t have enough room for a compost tumbler, heap or system. Burying the compost in the small patch that you have is a space-efficient way to get rid of organic scraps.  

2. If you find it physically hard to move around compost. Let’s face it, turning compost to aerate it, then sifting it, moving it into wheelbarrows then spreading it on your garden can take more physical effort than one can manage. By composting in place, you get to skip all these steps. 

3. Composting in situ is the closest you can get to how composting happens in natural ecosystems. Can you imagine Mother Nature building three-part compost systems in the woods? I don’t think so! In nature, as plants die back, they’re covered with a layer of fallen leaves or other vegetation. In spring, new plants emerge from below this layer and start the process all over again. 

4. You start improving the quality of your soil right away. True, it happens very gradually and very slowly. But you don’t have to wait a full year or two before the results of your composting efforts are ready to go into the garden. 

5. Similarly, you don’t have to worry about harvesting your compost at the right time (when the compost is “cooked” enough) to feed your soil. Because you are feeding your soil all the time, no pitchfork needed!

And one Reason to Avoid Composting in Place. 

Time to deal with the elephant in the room. Or rather the mice, rats or raccoons in the garden. If your space is prone to a rodent infestation, then burying scraps might not be a good idea. Definitely don’t bury any traces of cooked food, meat, grains or dairy.  

If you decide to give composting in situ a try anyway, there are three solutions that might help with the pest problem.

An ultrasonic pest repeller works well for smaller spaces. Keep in mind you won’t necessarily see mice running away, covering their ears. That’s not how this works. But an ultrasonic device will make your garden inhospitable, and the pests will move on in a week or two. Just make sure you get an anti-pest device that’s designed for outdoor use. 

Secondly, make sure you bury your compost material at least ten inches deep in order to mask the smell.  

As a last resort, you can use composting in place just for your garden waste. Send the kitchen waste to your municipal collection or add it to a closed compost tumbler. 

5 Ways You Can Compost in Place

By now, you’re probably thinking: Ok, but how exactly do I do this? 

There are a few different ways to compost in situ. What follows is a brief introduction to each of them, including the advantages and disadvantages of each method. But I’d love to continue the conversation and get more tips from our own community of knowledgeable gardeners on Facebook. 

1. Bury scraps straight in the soil (The dig-drop-cover method). 

This is what we’re essentially doing in all these methods, but some will be more complex than others. 

The easiest way to compost in situ is to grab a hand spade, dig a small hole, add the organic material, then cover it up. The worms will sense a new source of food, travel to the location, and indulge in a bit of on-the-spot snacking. They’ll then go deposit their castings (their waste) all over your garden. What could be simpler?

By going around my garden beds clockwise every time I dig, I avoid burying too much compost material in the same place. And by the time I’m back to where I started, there’s no trace of undecomposed scraps in the ground. Except for eggshells, which will always take longer to break down. 

The pros of this method

You can do it anywhere you have a patch of dirt to dig in. You don’t need any special equipment other than a hand spade to dig with. If you so choose, you can do it every day or collect your scraps longer in the fridge and bury them about once a week. I prefer to do this more often because I don’t like having to dig a large hole to accommodate all our scraps.

The cons of this method

I found that this method works best in the off-season, from late fall until late spring. That’s when the soil is bare enough to allow me to dig without disturbing any roots.   

This is not a con for me, as I use this method in conjunction with a regular compost box method. So all I need to do is switch to the compost pile when the garden is too packed with growing plants to allow digging. 

Another detail worth mentioning is that this composting method might yield some surprises. Quite literally! Now if you’re a neat and tidy gardener who does not like interlopers, you might consider this a disadvantage. I, for one, love a good “what is this and when did I plant it?” head-scratcher come spring. 

This month, for example, I realized that I have potato plants growing through my wild strawberry (Fragaria vesca) plants. I didn’t plant potatoes there, but I’m sure I buried kitchen scraps there. I live for the mystery of what sprouts up next. 

2. Composting in place in a buried vessel.

This is a variation of the method above, except that you drop all your organic material in one vessel that is buried deep in the ground, with its opening at or above ground level. The vessel has holes that serve as a passage for worms and other microorganisms to access the kitchen scraps you’re adding at the top. 

Again, the worms come in, feast on your scraps, then “disseminate” the results all over your garden.

I keep using the word “vessel” because there are a few options you can go for. The container that you use can vary as long as it follows these two simple rules:

• It needs to have holes for the worms to go in and out;
• You need to have a lid that fits properly, to keep the critters away (and the smells in).

The pipe method

To give credit where it’s due, I first learned about this system from a permaculture course run by Morag Gamble. Morag is a well-known Global Permaculture Ambassador whom I’ve been following for years. I really like her no-nonsense approach to teaching about no-dig gardening and how to lower soil disturbance. 

However, there was one problem with the way she was doing in-ground composting, in my opinion. She half-buried a PVC pipe with holes in it. She would then add scraps to this pipe (via the top of the tube), which were then used by the underground worms. Morag moved between several such structures in her garden so as not to overfill one and to give the worms enough time to consume the organic material. 

Doesn’t this sound brilliant? Yup, it does. 

However, I did not want to use a PVC pipe. Mainly because I’d be growing food right next to it and couldn’t find a PVC pipe that was graded food-safe. And even if I could (in the plumbing department), it would be very hard to guarantee this once you started drilling holes in it. Plus, I was trying to avoid as much plastic as possible in my garden. (Not always possible, but I sure as punch wouldn’t want to introduce more plastic when other natural materials are available.) 

Here are a few ideas for vessels that I have used with great success: 

• A basket made of natural materials (preferably one with a loose weave). I used a mid-sized wicker basket and buried it all the way to the top rim. Since this was a picnic basket, it already came with a lid. 
• A wood box with perforated sides and without a bottom; so basically a wood tube structure; We made this at home as a try-out and it worked great. 
• A terracotta pot with a large drainage hole; this one started as an olla in the summer (an in-ground irrigation system) which I then turned into a composting in place container in the winter and spring. 
• A large bamboo tube with holes drilled in it. 

The pros of this method

Unlike the previous method, you only dig a few times (depending on how many vessels you scatter around your garden). You don’t have to dig and bury every time you want to dispose of scraps. 

The cons of this method

It requires some extra materials. But a couple of rounds around your local thrift stores should secure at least a few vessels to get you started. Do keep in mind that whatever you buy must either be already perforated or easy to drill into. It should also either come with a lid or you should find something else that works as a lid. 

3. Chop-and-drop composting in place

We may not think of the chop-and-drop method as composting in place, but that’s exactly what we’re doing. We are not taking the dead plant, adding it to a compost pile, then bringing back the finished compost. Instead, we’re letting the plant decompose on the surface of the soil, in the same location where it was growing. 

True, it’s not as “in place” as burying your organic material. But it still happens in situ. You may even bury it in the spring by adding another layer of fresh compost on top, but not all gardeners do that. 

Chop-and-drop is a method that works really well in the fall when the garden usually produces a large quantity of chopped material. So once we’re done with pruning, we can leave the plant debris in situ and let the worms and soil bacteria do the rest. Optionally, you can cover this with a layer of dry leaves or straw later in the fall. 

Usually, by the time spring rolls around, the organic material has either been taken down by the worms or has been significantly decomposed. A good layer of fresh compost and mulch is enough to cover what’s left. 

Can you chop-and-drop in spring?

Yes, you can use this method of composting year-round. In fact, I do a good amount of my chop-and-drop composting in the spring. I’ve mentioned before that I garden in a small backyard, where every inch needs to do quadruple duty. That means that once spring crops are done and dusted, summer crops will follow closely. That’s how my spring bulbs and my tomatoes have ended up sharing a bed. The timing worked surprisingly well one year, and then I stuck to it. 

I garden in a climate where transplanting tomatoes outdoors before late May is an exercise in frustration. (Ask me how I know!) So rather than biting my nails in frustration while looking at a forecast in the 30s or 40s Fahrenheit (that’s single digits in Celsius), I’d rather bide my time and hold off on transplanting my tomato babies until the last weekend in May. That’s usually a safe bet. 

This delay means that I can repurpose some of the spots where I had spring bulbs planted without affecting the integrity of the bulbs. By the end of May, the leaves on the tulips, hyacinths, muscari and fritillaria have dried naturally, so the bulbs have stored enough energy for their next blooming season. 

Most of the bulbs are naturalized in my garden, so they’ll stay in the ground year-round. All that’s left for me to do is gently remove the foliage that comes off and set it on the ground next to the bulbs. I do the same for other crops that are past their prime, such as miner’s lettuce (the earliest salad green that I can grow), purple nettles and the leaves of the saffron crocus. 

Voila! The spring chop-and-drop. 

This will act as a mulch for the tomatoes over the summer months. If the bed needs a top-up, I can also cover the chop-and-drop layer with another layer of finished compost at any point during the growing season. 

The pros of this method

First of all, not having to worry about whether my small compost box can accommodate all the prunings generated by my garden in the fall is the most obvious advantage of this method. The consistency of this method is also very much in line with my gardening philosophy.

It adds a constant supply of nutrients to garden beds. I’m building up rich soil exactly where I need it. This allows me to plant two intensive crops (bulbs and tomatoes) in quick succession in the same bed. 

The chop-and-drop method also acts as a mulch against soil erosion and compaction, especially during the cold months when not much else is growing.  

The cons of this method

If you’re a gardener who likes a neat and formal garden, the chop-and-drop method is probably not for you. It may end up looking a bit too messy and random.

In this case, a compromise solution might work. You don’t have to do the drop part as long as you do the chop part.

So instead of pulling out veggies and annuals at the end of the season, simply cut them at ground level and leave the roots in the soil. The root system will simply decompose in the ground, feeding the good guys and keeping the soil aerated. You can add the part of the plant that you’re cutting to a regular compost bin. 

Another detail to pay attention to is removing diseased plants from the garden instead of dropping them in situ.

This is especially important for fungal diseases, such as tomato blight and rose black spot. 

These first three methods are suitable for composting as you go. So as you generate the organic material, you can start composting it right away. 

For the following two methods, you need to collect a bit of organic waste before you start composting it. (I call it waste, but there’s no such thing as waste in nature. And that’s what we’re aiming for when composting in situ.)

4. Trench composting between rows. 

There are several variations of trench composting, but I’ll focus on composting between rows because it’s truly different from the other “in-ground” methods. This composting in-place method is more suitable for fall when, in addition to scraps, you also have garden debris to process.

And it’s especially effective if you’re gardening in raised beds. You’re basically using the empty real estate space in between your garden beds in the off-season to compost close to where you need the end product.  

Start by digging a trench in between your garden beds. Set aside the soil that you’re digging out. You’ll be using some of it to top up your compost trench. What’s left of the soil that you displace will be added to your raised beds. 

Dig your trench deep enough – about one to two feet (30-60 cm), depending on what you have underneath. Then start filling it back up with a combination of fruit and veggie scraps, dry leaves, grass clipping and shredded garden waste. Bury everything under a layer of dirt and forget about it for the rest of the fall and winter. The mound will slowly decompose. 

Come spring, right before you start planting in your beds, the compost trench will have turned into nutritious soil. Dig it up and top up your garden beds with this super-soil. The pathway between your beds will no longer be trench-shaped by this point, so you can walk on it as usual. By letting nature do the job, you’re making your own clean soil amendment for free. 

Trench rotation variation 

Another variation of this method is to decommission one of your garden beds by turning it into the designated trench area. Depending on what season you’re doing this, it may take about three to four months (or longer) for the compost materials to decompose.

Once the material in the trench bed has decomposed, that specific garden bed can be put back into veggie growing rotation. You will grow amazing vegetables with this super-soil. It’s great at feeding nutrient-intensive vegetables, such as tomatoes and cucumbers. 

The pros of this method

You only dig once since you’re digging a larger surface area. You can also dispose of a larger quantity of organic material than you would with the previous two methods.

The cons of this method 

Just like the previous methods, you still have to bury your compost deep enough to prevent critters or pets from digging it out. Another disadvantage is that you can’t use this method all year long. Unless, that is, you dig your trench away from your garden beds. 

In addition to these two cons, you also need to collect quite a lot of material in order to be worth digging a trench. I usually start freezing my kitchen scraps about a month ahead of starting my trench. Couple that with the bags of dry leaves, brown paper bags (unwaxed and non-glossy) and all my fall pruning debris, and I have plenty to compost. 

5. Lasagna composting in your garden beds.

My colleague, Cheryl, has an amazing no-dig garden that is not only super-productive but also a joy to look at. She wrote an extensive guide on how to build a no-dig garden, and creating a garden bed lasagna-style is part of the process.  

In the fall, you’re layering compost and organic matter (including kitchen scraps) in the spot where you’re building your bed. As all these “lasagna ingredients” decompose, they’ll form the backbone of your new garden bed. 

But you don’t have to build a no-dig garden. You can simply use the lasagna method to fill a regular garden bed. I’ve done my own share of lasagna bed building over the last three years, as I’ve been converting part of my paved backyard into sunk garden beds. It was, and still is a process.

After gradually removing about two hundred concrete pavers and the one-to-two-feet-deep layer of sand we found underneath, we had a large hole to fill back up. 

Enter lasagna bed building. 

We built our beds back up using all the prunings we’d cut in the fall, small blocks of decomposing (untreated) wood, as much organic kitchen waste as we could save in our freezer and bags of leaf mold. We topped it off with finished compost from our own compost bin. (Yes, we have one of those too.)

The pros of this method

Using the lasagna composting method to build up our veggie and perennial beds has saved us a significant amount of money. As we created our garden beds gradually, over the course of three years, we actually saved more and more by using the “fillers” that our garden generated.

In the first year, we had to buy compost to top up the beds. But by the last bed we built, everything we used had been collected and grown in our own garden. The feeling of satisfaction (dare I say, smugness) is priceless. 

The cons of this method

Just like the previous method (trench composting), this one also requires a bit of planning. You have to collect your organic material diligently over the course of several months. Perhaps more of an inconvenience is having to store all of this material during the collection phase.

We had bags of dead leaves (turning into leaf mold) stacked in our shed. Bags of kitchen scraps in our freezer. And various piles of garden debris stashed away in the corners of our backyard. Even though they were out of sight, I still knew that they were there, so it was grating on my sense of order.

But filling a garden bed without buying an ounce of compost was well worth it. 

Wow! That was quite a composting-in-place tour de force, wasn’t it? Long gone are the days when I was intimidated by the thought of making my own compost. I’m sure there are many other ways and variations to do it. And I’m curious to find out how you’re composting in place if you’d like to share with our Facebook community.

The post 5 Methods to Compost-in-Place – The Easiest Way to Compost Food Scraps appeared first on Rural Sprout.

The transition from crisp and colorful autumn leaves to crumbly and dark leaf mold is – normally – a very slow process.

Do nothing more than rake your leaves into one big pile, and the heap will undoubtedly turn into leaf mold, given enough time. Let nature run its course, and the leaves will rot down into a humusy material in about 2 to 3 years.

Putting in a little extra effort when setting up a new leaf pile, though, will shave off the time it takes to create finished leaf mold to just one year.

Many of the same principles for quicker composting apply to leaf mold making. Particle size, pile volume, airflow, and consistent moisture will all make a world of difference in the efficiency and productivity of your leaf pile.

Set up your leaf pile for success now, and you’ll have yourself a predictable annual leaf mold harvesting cycle each and every fall.

1. Build a Leaf Bin

Having a dedicated leaf bin is the first step in making the leaf mold magic.

Building a leaf mold enclosure has practical benefits. It will keep all the leaves together in one place and prevent them from being blown away in the wind. And you’ll know the exact spot to harvest from next autumn.

Binning the leaves is also helpful for achieving the volume necessary for quicker decomposition. Just like with compost, the bigger the pile, the faster the result.

The leaf bin should be large enough to house at least 3 cubic feet of leaves. This is easy enough to do with a 10-foot length of hardware cloth, 36 inches wide.

Roll the wire mesh into a cylinder, tie the ends together, and twist it into the ground. It will create a roughly 3’ x 3’ x 3’ area inside the bin. It’s a quick project that only takes about 10 minutes to assemble and set up.

For a more permanent container, you could also make a leaf bin with wooden pallets, wattle fencing, loosely stacked bricks, or other materials you have on hand. Compost and leaf mold have the same housing requirements, and many of these compost bin DIYs could easily double as leaf mold bins.

2. Set Up Your Leaf Bin Near Trees

The main difference between compost and leaf mold is the types of microorganisms that work to break down the pile.

Compost – a medley of kitchen scraps and yard waste – is an attractive food source for bacteria. The higher the population of microbes, the hotter the heap will get. Maintaining a hot temperature of 150°F to 160°F (65°C to 71°C) will ensure you’ll have your hands on finished compost quickly.

Leaf mold, on the other hand, is primarily worked over by fungi that prefer to operate in much cooler conditions.

There will be numerous fungal species processing the leaf pile. Most are mesophiles that reproduce best in moderate temperatures between 41°F and 95°F (5°C and 35°C). Although some species can survive high heat, many molds will die at temperatures above 130°F (54°C).

So while you would want to locate a compost pile in a sunny spot, a leaf mold bin is best situated in a shaded or partially shaded location.

Setting up a leaf bin in a sheltered place will keep it cooler during the hottest days of summer. It will also retain moisture better when it’s not baking away under the hot sun – which means less watering maintenance for you!

Although any shady spot would do, try to place your leaf mold bin beneath the boughs of trees. This will give the required shade, but it’s also a place where the leaf-loving fungi already live. The pre-existing colonies will quickly find and start reproducing in your leaf bin, giving the pile an excellent head start.

3. Shred the Leaves

The single most important thing you can do to hasten the transformation of leaves into leaf mold is to shred the leaves before piling them up.

The more crushed, chopped, and pulverized the leaves are, the greater the surface area will be for the hordes of fungi, molds, earthworms, and millipedes to process.

I use a leaf mulcher like this one. It’s great for sucking up fallen leaves and shredding them on the go. And it eliminates the chore of raking – the mulched leaves are collected in the bag and can be emptied directly into the leaf bin.

You could also use an electric leaf shredder or a lawnmower with a bag attachment for chopping up leaves.

If you don’t have access to machinery, simply bagging the leaves up and crushing them with your feet will break them into smaller pieces.

Leaf mulching is easiest when leaves are dry and brittle. Wet leaves clump together and have a tendency to clog up the rotating blades. For a less frustrating experience, do your leaf shredding when there hasn’t been any rain for several days.

Fill up your bin all the way to the top. Over the next few days, the leaves will settle, giving you more room for fresh leaf deposits.  

Top it back up with shredded leaves. You can do this over and over until the bin is full and the pile no longer shrinks.

4. Water the Leaf Pile Thoroughly

As you dump more and more leaves in the bin, stop every so often and give the pile a good soak.

For every 6 to 12 inches of fresh leaves added, water the pile thoroughly with a garden hose or watering can. This will ensure the entire pile gets the moisture needed for the fungi to grow.

The leaf mold pile should be moist – but not dripping wet – at all times.

Once the bin is filled up, and the leaves inside are well watered, you can let rainfall take care of the rest.

Check-in on your pile periodically – especially during heat waves – and irrigate again if the leaves are beginning to dry out.

5. Turn the Leaf Pile Occasionally

Over the next few months, the leaf mold pile will continually shrink in size. The leaves, once vibrant in color, will turn a solid dull brown.  

Let nature do its thing, and you’ll have a pile of leaf mold by next autumn. In an unturned pile, the outermost layer will be partially decomposed, while the stuff in the center will be rich, dark, and crumbly.

Aerating the leaf pile will speed up the rate of decomposition by introducing more oxygen into the heap.

Turning it over will also create a more uniform consistency in the finished leaf mold, giving the semi-rotted exterior leaves a chance to break down too.

The frequency of turning the pile is totally up to you. The more times you stir it up, the better the airflow will be for the fungi and earthworms to spread and proliferate.

Read Next: How to Harvest Leaf Mold & 4 Ways to Use It

The post 5 Ways to Speed Up Your Leaf Mold Pile appeared first on Rural Sprout.

Every spring in temperate climates, shade trees wake up from a long winter’s nap. Their expansive root systems run deep into the earth, pulling up nitrogen and other important nutrients that smaller plants simply can’t access.

The leaves that formed on the branches through spring and summer will eventually fall to the ground in autumn. Along the forest floor, the fallen leaves slowly decompose and return those buried nutrients back to the upper layers of the soil.

Year after year, dropped tree leaves help keep the soil fertile for more shallow-rooted plants to enjoy.

Aided by earthworms and fungi, in time, the leaves will break down into dark, crumbly humus. As nature’s mulch, leaf mold insulates the ground against extreme heat and cold. It conditions the soil, too, buffering pH levels, improving soil structure, and boosting water holding capacity.

Although it’s not nearly as potent as traditional compost, leaf mold supplies traces of 16 essential nutrients for plant growth. It’s also a terrific food source for soil microbes that are crucial to creating healthy soils for plants to thrive in.

Leaf mold is the stuff of permaculture dreams: it’s an organic, locally available, renewable, and abundant resource that upholds the ingenuity of natural ecosystems.

It’s really easy to make leaf mold. All you need to do is collect your fallen leaves into a pile and keep the pile moist. It can take anywhere from 1 to 3 years for fresh leaves to break down into friable leaf compost.

How to Tell When Leaf Mold is Ready to Be Harvested

This leaf mold pile is one year old. It’s enclosed with hardware cloth, roughly 3 feet in diameter and 4 feet in height. I shredded the leaves last autumn before tossing them in the pile.

The pile is very dense. After opening up the bin, it stays in a stout cylindrical shape.

It’s hard to believe it was once filled to the brim with leaves. Now it’s about 7 inches tall.  

The top and sides of the pile are only semi-decomposed.

But take a shovel and dig into the center, and you should see the well-rotted stuff underneath.

Finished leaf mold is a lot like finished compost – dark and crumbly and free of any distinct leafy matter.

Your leaf pile isn’t quite there yet if it hasn’t shrunk much and the interior isn’t fully broken down. If that’s the case, make sure you keep the heap moist and give it another year to molder.

Retrieving Leaf Mold

The leaves in the pile will decompose at different rates. The outermost layer – exposed to drying sun and winds – will break down slower than those in the center.

To retrieve the good stuff, remove the less rotted leaves and set them aside.

Once you’ve gotten to the innards of the pile, you can shovel it out and use the leaf mold in the garden right away as a soil conditioner and mulch. Or, you can sift it into a finer growing medium for making potting soils.

I used my compost sifter to separate the leaf mold proper from the wet leafy remnants.

While sifting, I came across loads of earthworms. These little guys love the leaf pile, and binning your leaves is another fantastic way to encourage more worm life in your yard.

After screening out the larger bits, what you’re left with is a dark earthy material.

Sifted leaf mold has a fabulous texture. It’s remarkably light, soft, and crumbly.

How to Use Leaf Mold

As a winter mulch:

The less decomposed leaf mold can be spread around the garden as winter mulch.

Tuck your vegetable plots in for the winter by covering the beds with a 3-inch layer to protect the bare soil. It will help keep the soil in place, shield it from eroding winds, and go a long way toward keeping it free of weeds come spring.

The semi-rotted material will serve as a habitat for overwintering insects and beneficial microorganisms. As it continues to break down, it will condition the soil and add a little fertility into the mix as well.

As a soil conditioner:

The fully degraded leaf compost at the center of the pile can be added to the garden as a top dressing any time of year.

Among its many admirable qualities, leaf mold works dynamically to fix poor-quality soils. It will add some much-needed moisture retention to sandy soils that drain too quickly; in denser clay, it will lighten the soil to improve airflow and drainage.

Leaf mold adds valuable organic matter to mineral soils, attracting soil-dwelling microbes wherever it’s spread.

As an energy source for bacteria and fungi, it helps create a tiny microbiome for the true heroes of the garden. These teeny organisms – numbering in the gazillions – are what improve soil structure, cycle nutrients, and fight off diseases, pests, and even weeds.

To foster all-around healthier soil in vegetable plots and ornamental beds, pull back any mulch and scatter leaf mold around the base of plants to a depth of 2 inches.

To make potting soil:

Sift your leaf mold, and you’ll have a perfect ingredient for homemade potting soils.

Leaf mold is a soilless growing medium that’s exceptionally good at holding on to air and moisture. It shares many of the same qualities as peat moss but is entirely earth-friendly and sustainable.

You can use leaf mold as a substitute in any potting soil recipe that calls for peat moss or coconut coir.

Combined with compost for nutrients and perlite for drainage, leaf mold is an excellent component in a triple mix.

To make an all-purpose potting soil for planters, baskets, boxes, and other container garden plants, mix together 40% compost, 40% leaf mold, and 20% perlite.

To start seeds:

Leaf mold is an awesome alternative to peat moss when starting seeds, too.

It provides all the things that a good germinating environment should be – light, airy, moist, well-draining, and low in nutrients.

To use leaf mold to start seeds, fill up your pots or seedling trays with screened leaf mold. Sow your seeds, water, and then cover with a humidity tent.

These Cosmos seedlings began to poke up in just 3 days. By day 5, they were fully up and at ‘em.

Once the seedlings are large enough to be handled, they can be transplanted into a more nutritious potting soil mix.

The post How to Harvest Leaf Mold & 4 Ways to Use It appeared first on Rural Sprout.

Caring for a compost pile is much like tending a garden. We feed it, we water it, we give it good airflow. And in return, we get to see the magic of our kitchen scraps and yard waste transform into rich and loamy humus before our very eyes.

Compost is ready to harvest when it has a dark and crumbly texture and an earthy scent. The particles should be mostly indiscernible, but it doesn’t need to be perfect. Stringy, sticky, and lumpy compost is fine for the taking too.

Sifting the compost will help keep larger pieces – like sticks, stones, and bones – out of the final product.

It’s not an imperative to sift and you can certainly use less than pristine compost right away. But sifting does create a most wonderfully light and fluffy compost that is easier to spread around the garden.

Materials:

• 4 lengths of 2×4 lumber, cut to size                         
• Hardware cloth, 1” or 1/2” mesh
• Deck screws, 3” long
• Fence staples, 3/4″

Assemble the Sifter Frame

The size of the compost sifter will entirely depend on what you’ll be sifting the compost into. Whether it’s a plastic tote, a garden cart, or a wheelbarrow, you can make the sifter any dimensions you like.

In general, a 36” x 24” sifter will provide a good surface area for processing the compost.

I’ll be sifting my compost into a wheelbarrow, and this particular wheelbarrow has rounded sides. I want the sifter frame to sit flat so I measured the size of the tub, then added a few inches to length and subtracted a few inches from the width.

I ended up with a finished frame size of 36” x 18.5”.

Once you’ve measured twice and cut once, position the wood pieces into a frame shape with the wide sides facing out.

Then drill 2 deck screws in each corner to hold it all together.  

Attach the Hardware Cloth

The mesh size of the hardware cloth will determine how fine or coarse the finished compost will be.

I’m using 1/2” x 1/2” mesh to make a finer compost, but a larger 1”x 1” gauge would make processing go faster by allowing bigger materials through the screen.

Roll out the hardware cloth over the frame. Start in one corner and hammer in a fence staple.

Working your way outwards, keep the screen taut while affixing staples to the mesh every 3 inches or so.

After you’ve finished stapling the last side, use wire cutters to snip off the remaining hardware cloth.

The cut ends of the hardware cloth are very sharp. Use a hammer all around the edges of the frame to tamp down the tines so you don’t get snagged.

Using the Compost Sifter

Flip the sifter over so the screen runs along the bottom of the frame.

Dump 2 to 3 shovelfuls of compost to the sieve. Take care not to toss in too much at a time, as it’ll only make it trickier to sift without spilling it over the sides.

Spread the compost out over the sifter with your hands. Breaking up clumps as you go, push the compost all around the screen. Use back-and-forth and circular motions to work it through the squares.

The smaller particles will fall into the tub and the larger debris will stay on top of the screen.

The undigested bits will go right back into the compost heap to continue breaking down. For now, I’ll put them aside and toss them back into the pile once the bin has been emptied and all the compost has been sifted.

Running your hands through sifted compost is oddly satisfying – it’s so soft and luxurious!

Use your freshly harvested compost right away to make new garden beds or recharge the soil in existing ones. It’s a top notch ingredient in potting soil and seed starting mixes, too.

You can also set some aside for later use by bagging it up and stowing it in a cool, dry place. Leave the tops of the bags open and exposed to air. Every so often, check to make sure the compost is still slightly moist.

Homemade compost is teeming with microbial life and a broad spectrum of nutrients. It will be at its best for 3 to 6 months post-harvesting so make sure to use it up as soon as you can.

Read Next:

13 Common Things You Should Never Compost

The post How to Easily Make a Compost Sifter – No DIY Skills Required appeared first on Rural Sprout.

What is compost?

Compost is, in essence, decomposed matter that can be fed to plants. 

We’ve found that many people are overwhelmed by the idea of composting and are afraid to mess it up.

We’re here to tell you, that it’s easier than it seems, pretty difficult to mess up, and can even be done in such a lazy way that it takes practically no effort to make beautiful black gold for your garden. 

Why should you make compost?

Composting is the perfect way to cut down on the amount of waste you send to landfills, and feed your garden and potted plants in a natural, organic way.

When your kitchen scraps and yard waste goes into trash bags then sent to the landfill, it can take decades to properly decay and return to the earth.

Conversely, if you compost that material, it can return to the earth in just a few months. 

Composting not only cuts down on the amount of greenhouse gases and waste you produce, it’s also a perfect fertilizer for your garden. Compost feeds your plants organically, helping them to grow big and strong. 

The best part about compost? It’s free! Feeding your plants fertilizer from the garden store can be extremely expensive, but making your own with compost is free.

How is compost made?

Compost is made by simply gathering up fresh and dead organic waste and keeping it in the same area until it rots. It’s really that simple!

Compost happens naturally without human intervention every day. Forest floors are filled with decaying organic matter that naturally feeds the trees above. 

When you make an intentional compost pile, you can choose what goes in and what stays out. You can also determine how fast or slow your compost pile will break down.

You can encourage the organic matter to break down more quickly by flipping the compost pile every few days, or you can let it do its thing and slowly decompose all on its own.

Where do you make compost?

Where you make your compost depends entirely on your living situation. We keep a compost pile right on the ground in the back corner of our yard. Living in the country gives us this luxury, as we’re not likely to hear complaints from neighbors, or have problems with varmints such as rats in the pile. 

If you do live in the city or suburbs, you may be better off using a compost tumbler or compost bin. This will keep the pile contained and safe from animals, as well as look nice in your yard.

What do you need to make compost

There are four basic components to the perfect compost pile: Water, oxygen, green materials, and brown materials.

These four components work together to break down into the perfect nutritious medley for your garden.

Water

The reason organic materials break down is due to tiny organisms called microbes. Those microbes need water to continue to thrive and break down the matter. Too much water and too little water will both kill those microbes, leading to a pile that doesn’t break down. 

Water is naturally added to a compost pile via green materials as well as rain (for an open compost pile) but if you live in a dry area, you may need to supplement your pile with water from the hose.

A compost pile with the perfect amount of water is spongy to the touch, without any bad smells, or pooling water.

Oxygen

One of the most essential parts of compost is oxygen. The organic matter is broken down by insects and microbes that need oxygen to survive. We suggest weekly flipping of the compost pile to introduce more oxygen and aid in breaking down the matter quicker. 

Compost tumblers make this easy, as you only have to turn them a few times to get that much needed oxygen in. If you’re utilizing a compost heap or pile on the ground, you can use a pitchfork or shovel to turn the pile over, so everything on the bottom is now on top. 

Many people utilize a two-part compost pile for this purpose. One side is always full, and one side is always empty. When turning the pile, shovel all the material into the empty side. Then next time you turn it, put all the material back onto the other side. This system makes for easy turning!

Green Materials 

For the perfect compost pile, you’ll need one part ‘green’ to two parts ‘brown.’ Green materials are those that are rich in nitrogen. Green materials are usually wet, have been freshly cut- like grass or plants, or were recently living, like most kitchen scraps.

Examples of green materials are freshly cut grass clippings, kitchen scraps like veggie and fruit peels, weeds from the garden, and manure from livestock.

Brown Materials

For every one part green materials, you’ll need to add two parts brown. Brown materials are those that are rich in carbon. Think of brown materials as dead plant material. It tends to be dry instead of the living green materials which tend to be wet.

Examples of brown materials are dead leaves, straw, wood shavings and sawdust, paper and cardboard, pine needles that have browned, and fibers like cotton and wool.

Things to put in your compost pile

• Animal Hair
• Apple Cores
• Avocado Pits/Peels
• Banana Peels
• Beer
• Bread
• Cantaloupe Rinds
• Cardboard- boxes, toilet paper rolls – just be sure it isn’t waxy, covered in tape, or have plastic on it!
• Coffee Filters
• Coffee Grounds
• Compostable utensils and cups
• Corn Stalks
• Cotton- clothing (shredded), swabs and pads, cotton balls
• Dead Leaves
• Dryer Lint
• Dust and Dirt from the vacuum
• Eggshells
• Feathers
• Flowers
• Fresh Leaves
• Herbs
• Homebrew leftovers
• Human Hair from hair cuts or hair brushes
• Livestock Bedding
• Manure from livestock- rabbits, cows, horses, sheep, goats, chickens, etc.
• Oats and oatmeal
• Paper
• Paper Towels and Napkins
• Pasta
• Pine Needles- both fresh and dead
• Popcorn- popped and kernels
• Pumpkins/Jack-o-Lanters from Halloween
• Rice
• Sawdust (use sparingly in the compost pile)
• Newspaper (shredded)
• Nut Shells (except walnut)
• Rags
• Seaweed
• Spices
• Tea Bags and Loose Tea
• Toothpicks
• Tree Bark
• Twigs
• Vegetable Scraps
• Wood Ash
• Wool

Related Reading: Can I Compost That? 101 Things You Can & Should Compost

Things to leave out of your compost

• Sawdust or shavings from pressure-treated wood
• Wood ash from commercial fire logs
• Paper that contains plastic- examples: envelopes with windows, coated paper, paper with tape on it
• Meat
• Animal Bones
• Dairy Products
• Manure from carnivorous animals- humans, dogs, cats, ferrets, etc.
• Oil
• Fish
• Fatty Foods
• Diseased Plants
• Plants with pests
• Walnuts

Related Reading: 13 Common Things You Really Shouldn’t Compost

Tips on water management

Watering your compost pile is not an exact science and not something you should fret over. However, for your compost pile to break down efficiently, it does need a certain balance of water. 

The key is to add just enough water to the compost pile so when you press on it, it feels like a moist, springy sponge. 

Adding too much water to the pile will result in slow decomposition and can be stinky. If your compost pile is too wet, flip it more frequently to aid in it drying out a bit.

On the other hand, leaving your compost pile too dry will also cause decomposition to slow or stop, as it needs water to break down the material. An easy fix is to add enough water to your pile so it feels spongy again!

Using your finished compost

There are plenty of great uses for that finished compost, or black gold as gardeners like to say!

Compost can be tilled into the garden in the spring before planting to give seeds and seedlings a nutrient boost. 

It can also be used as a ‘side dressing’ for plants, shrubs, and trees as they mature. To dress your plants, simply put a ring of compost around the base of the plant. As the plant gets water, the compost will slowly work its way into the soil, releasing nutrients to the roots below.

Compost can be mixed into potting soil before planting seeds, seedlings, or transplants in pots. This will give the plants a much needed dose of nutrients while they grow.

You’ll find no matter how much you compost, you’ll never have enough for your gardening needs, so keep making more every season! It’s good for the earth and good for you!

Read Next:

How To Make Compost in 14 Days with the Berkeley Method

The post Compost 101: Everything You Need to Know to Start a Compost Pile appeared first on Rural Sprout.

When it comes to sustainable fertilizer options, flies aren’t quick to come to mind. But the truth is, a black soldier fly composting system is one of the quickest, most convenient ways to break down food scraps to turn them into something useful.

As with all forms of composting, the goal of a black soldier fly composting system is to turn waste material into something valuable.

Instead of fertilizer, you’re creating a stellar food supply for backyard livestock.

With this system, a harmless fly chews through your manure, meat, and food scraps, transforming them into fat grubs that chickens love to snack on. This is an excellent way to use up animal carcasses and other pungent material that takes months or longer to break down through traditional composting.

If you have chickens or a large garden, you’re doing yourself a disservice not to consider setting up this composter. Learn here why you need a black soldier fly composting system and what it takes to set up your own.

About the Black Soldier Fly

Don’t confuse the black soldier fly (Hermetia Illucens) with your standard household pest.

These insects are larger than standard houseflies (about half an inch) and more closely resemble black wasps. They lack mouths and stingers—in fact, they only survive in the fly stage of development for two days, during which they mate and lay eggs before dying.

Though they thrive best in tropical and subtropical regions, you can find black soldier flies throughout America.

You’ll rarely find this insect in your home, as they prefer spending their limited time around manure or compost piles where they lay their eggs.

The inch-long, whitish larva that hatches out will make quick work of any garbage, chewing through the detritus within a matter of days.

As an added benefit, the flies turn your garbage into a form that’s easier for worms to digest, making it the perfect pairing for a worm composting system. In fact, if you’re used to seeing giant maggots in your compost pile, then odds are you already are familiar with black soldier flies.

Note: If you want to encourage both species to thrive in the same system, bury any food scraps at least six inches into the bin. This makes them accessible to worms, while flies will eat what’s on the surface. That way, the two won’t interfere with each other.

7 Benefits of Black Soldier Fly Composting

There’s a lot to like about a black soldier fly composting system. Here are some of the benefits.

Breaks Down Food Fast:

As black soldier fly larva tends to feast on nitrogen-rich materials, they can make quick work of kitchen scraps. If you have a small composting system, you can expect them to go through around a kilogram of food a day—far faster results than what you’ll get with worms.

Animal Products are Allowed:

Beyond manure, you can also add meat and dairy products to a black soldier fly composting bin—regular composting systems, in contrast, can usually only handle plant-based material.

Easy Protein Source for Poultry:

Chickens, ducks, and other backyard birds adore black soldier fly larva, and the fat grubs offer them a nutrient-rich snack that’s up to 42% protein and 35% fat. You can even build your composting system to harvest the larva in buckets for extra convenient snacking. In fact, some believe that this larva has potential as a more sustainable form of commercial animal feed. And if you’re extra adventurous, the grubs are entirely edible for humans, too.

Breaks Down Carcasses Without Smell:

If you butcher animals at home, you might be left without a plan for the resulting carcass. Toss it into a black soldier fly composter, and it will disappear in days—no smell or inconvenience.

Keeps Pest Flies Far Away:

Counterintuitive as it may seem to use flies to keep other flies away, maintaining habitat space for mild-mannered black soldier flies means you may have fewer pest flies around. This is a time-tested strategy in the American South where they were encouraged around outhouses and nicknamed ‘privy flies’ for their eating habits.

Closed Loop Composting System for Livestock:

Black soldier fly composters are the perfect complement to keeping meat chickens. You can toss the remnants in the bin after butchering day, and the resulting grubs will help feed your next generation of chickens.

Reduces Disease Transmission:

Due to their feeding efficiency, black soldier flies break down manure and rotting garbage before other flies can find it, which significantly reduces the risk of disease transmission.

Inspiration for How to Set Up a Black Soldier Fly Composting System

Ready to start composting with black soldier flies? The process is easier than you might expect.

Though plans vary online and can be as complicated as desired, the basic requirement is that you provide the flies with a container filled with organic material. It needs to have a drainage hole on the bottom so that it doesn’t flood, and any lid should have gaps for flies to flit in and out of.

For best results, put absorbent material (such as shredded paper, coffee grounds, or wood shavings) in the bottom few inches of the bin. You can then add manure, kitchen scraps, or any other available organic material on top. The system should soon start attracting black soldier flies, and once you get a few, others will be drawn over, and the population will increase rapidly.  

This basic bin system works well for breaking down waste material. If you want to harvest the larva, consider building a composting system with tubing on the sides to direct the grubs into a collection chamber. Or, better yet, put the composter in your chicken coop so the birds can forage for their own dinner.

Here are some plans for inspiration.

Community Chickens shares a plan for building a composter from cinder blocks and two plastic bins, one large (50 gallons or more) for composting and one smaller for collecting the larva.

Create a smaller scale, more contained composting system with instructions from Treehugger. It’s practical for those who want to dabble in fly composting without committing to a massive system.  

Nature’s Always Right’s video instructions demonstrate how to build a larger scale soldier fly composter with plastic bins and plywood for placement directly in the chicken coop.

Not interested in DIY? It’s also possible to purchase pre-made fly larva composters. And for those who merely want to capitalize on their nutrient content, you can buy dried soldier fly larva online for use as chicken and fish feed.

Regardless of your scale, transforming your home waste into black soldier fly larva is a smart, sustainable, and cost-effective composting method that your chickens will adore. Try it today, and you’ll find that there’s a lot to like about the humble ‘privy fly’.

The post Got Chickens? You Need a Black Soldier Fly Composting System appeared first on Rural Sprout.

In the natural world, the decomposition of plant and animal matter into rich and fertile topsoil is a very, very slow process.

Somewhere along the way, at least as far back as the days of the early Roman Empire, clever and impatient humans discovered how to replicate this process and speed it along considerably.

The fundamentals of a productive compost pile is achieving the proper volume, striking the right balance between carbon and nitrogen, always keeping it moist, and turning it over frequently. Follow these four rules and you shouldn’t need any kind of compost activator.

However, when your compost heap is inexplicably slow and inactive, or has been long forgotten and neglected, there are ways to wake up a sleeping compost and kick it into humus-making action.

Why Isn’t My Compost Heating Up?

Hot composting makes compost fast. Even quicker still is the Berkley Method for compost in as little as two weeks.

Compost will break down most efficiently between 150°F to 160°F (65°C to 71°C). This temperature range is hot enough to destroy pathogens and weed seeds, but not so hot as to kill off the beneficial microbes in the pile.

For a pile to heat up and stay hot throughout the entire composting process, it needs:

Volume

Smaller compost piles won’t retain heat as efficiently as larger ones. A slow compost can be re-energized by adding more materials until the heap reaches a minimum size of 3 cubic feet.

Moisture

Compost heaps should be kept moist but not soggy. Ideally, it will contain 40% to 60% moisture at all times – about the consistency of a wrung-out sponge.

Aeration

The more frequently you turn the pile, the faster it’ll cook. A compost heap turned daily will yield finished humus in two weeks. Turned every other day, three weeks. Every three days, a month.

C:N Ratio

Most often, the reason a compost heap slows to a crawl is an improper balance between nitrogen and carbon materials in the pile.

The ideal ratio of browns to greens is 30 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen.

This can be tricky to measure since not all browns contain an equal amount of carbon. For example, shredded cardboard has a very high carbon-to-nitrogen ratio (roughly 350 to 1) while dried leaves are comparatively lower in carbon (60 to 1).

Some folks find it easiest to add browns and greens in equal volume, adjusting amounts as they go along. Others prefer a more exacting method of tossing 2 to 3 buckets of carbon for each bucket of nitrogen.

Finding the right balance isn’t too difficult because the compost pile will always tell you what it needs. Too much nitrogen and the pile will start to stink; too much carbon and decomposition will slow down dramatically.

Fixing a slow pile is usually as simple as adding more nitrogen-rich materials to the pit. Nitrogen gives the microbes working the pile the protein needed to reproduce quickly. The more microorganisms at work breaking down the materials, the faster the compost is made.

6 Compost Activators to Fuel Your Heap

1. Urine

An underutilized, yet excellent source of nitrogen is within each of us. And it’s free, readily available, and renewable!

Indeed, human pee is a fantastic natural fertilizer and compost stimulator. In fact, the urine from all mammals plays an important role in the earth’s nitrogen cycle.

Although human urine is composed of more than 90% water, the rest is made up of organic solids, primarily urea. Urea is widely used as a fertilizer in agriculture.

With an average N-P-K value of 11-1-2.5, our pee contains significant levels of nitrogen. The addition of this liquid gold is easily the quickest way to fire up a cold compost.

So long as you’re healthy and not taking medication, it’s completely safe to pee on your compost.

The best time let it rain down on your pile is in the morning when urea levels will be at their highest concentration.

2. Grass Clippings

Freshly cut grass clippings added to the compost heap will turn a sluggish pile into a hot mess in no time.

Grass has an N-P-K value of 4-1-2 when it’s still green and moist and fresh. It loses its nitrogen content as it dries so it’s best to toss grass clippings in the compost immediately after mowing the lawn.

Cut grass decomposes rapidly once in the pile. While this is a great thing for fuelling the microbes and heating it up, grass consumes a lot of oxygen as it breaks down. Along with its tendency to stick together and form clumps, grass clippings can create anaerobic conditions that will cause the entire compost to smell.

It’s simple enough to avoid this by thoroughly mixing grass clippings with brown materials before adding it to the pile. Aim for at least a 2:1 carbon-to-grass clippings ratio.

Once the grass is in the compost, turn it after the first 24 hours. Keep turning it frequently in the coming days to prevent the grass from clumping together. Regular aeration will also keep the clippings better distributed throughout the pile.

3. Blood Meal

Blood meal has an N-P-K of 12-0-0, making it one of the richest organic sources of nitrogen.

A by-product of the slaughterhouse, animal blood is collected and dried into a powdery form. It’s typically used in the garden as an early season fertilizer that promotes explosive leafy growth.

Sprinkle it over your soil for a quick crop boost. It’s powerful stuff that can burn young plants if you overdo it so always apply it with a light hand.

Here’s our guide to using blood meal in the vegetable garden.

When worked into the soil, blood meal gives off an odor that is practically undetectable to us but is very useful for deterring rabbits and other critters from munching on your crops.

Blood meal is also the perfect foil for a lethargic compost pile. Especially when you have loads of carbon-rich yard waste and not enough greens to match, blood meal can act as the sole nitrogen provider in the heap.

To process a pile of leaves or woody matter, apply blood meal at a rate of 2.5 ounces for each cubic yard of carbon materials. 

Adding blood meal to compost that already contains some greens will take a bit more guesswork as you don’t want to throw your C:N ratios out of whack. Start with a small amount – just a teaspoon or two – and turn the pile well. If the compost doesn’t heat up within 24 to 48 hours, add a little more.

4. Alfalfa

Alfalfa (Medicago sativa) is an incredibly useful little plant to grow.

A legume and member of the pea family, alfalfa is a flowering herbaceous perennial with several amazing qualities.

As a nitrogen fixer, growing alfalfa alongside your other plants helps boost soil fertility.

Alfalfa blooms with pretty lavender flowers from June to September and these are very attractive to pollinators and other beneficial insects throughout the growing season. Birds love alfalfa too.

On the homestead, alfalfa’s nutritious foliage makes excellent forage and feed for chickens, ducks, goats, sheep, and many other barnyard animals.

When the season is over, alfalfa plants can be pulled, chopped up, and added back to the soil as a green manure.

Whether grown fresh in the garden or purchased as alfalfa meal, it’s a wonderful all-purpose fertilizer with an N-P-K of roughly 3-1-2. These nutrients are released into the soil slowly, making alfalfa gentle enough to be used on the youngest seedlings and sprouts.

Because of its higher nitrogen content, alfalfa is a good ingredient to get a compost cooking. Alfalfa meal can be used proactively to heat a pile by sprinkling it between brown and green layers. To fire up a slow pile, add and handful or two before giving the heap a turn.

5. Feather Meal

Believe it or not, bird feathers are an amazingly rich source of nitrogen.

Bird feathers are made up of approximately 90% keratin proteins and have nitrogen content between 12% and 15%.

Although feathers are fibrous, insoluble, and resistant to degradation outside of the compost, inside the heap they will be exposed to keratin-decomposing microorganisms that will break them down completely.

If you keep backyard chickens or ducks, you’ll surely have an endless supply of moult to feed the compost. An old down pillow, duvet, or jacket could also be pilfered for the downy feathers inside.

When composting “fresh” feathers to heat up a pile, soak them in a bucket of water for 24 hours before tossing them in. This step will not only weigh them down so they don’t blow away in the wind, pre-soaking feathers will also help them decompose just a little bit faster.

If you don’t have access to bird feathers, feather meal is also an option. This 12-0-0 slow release fertilizer is made by heating and sterilizing poultry feathers with steam pressure cookers. The feathers are then dried and ground up into a powder.

To use feather meal as a compost activator, add about a cup to start. Wait the requisite 24 to 48 hours and if the pile hasn’t gotten hot, toss in another cup.

6. Spent Coffee Grounds

Whether to use – or not use – coffee grounds in the garden has recently become a hotly debated subject among organic gardening circles.

On the one hand, used coffee grounds are a great source of nitrogen that will certainly rouse a sleepy compost heap.

Containing about 2% nitrogen, the by-product for your morning coffee is a very valuable green material, and composting it will keep it out of the landfill. It’s easy to acquire too – non-coffee drinkers can snag a few bags of spent coffee grounds courtesy of their local coffee shops.

On the other hand, scientific inquiries into incorporating coffee grounds into garden soil as a fertilizer, or mulch, or in the compost have had mixed results.

Composted coffee grounds boosted the growth and yield of beets, cabbages, and soybeans in one experiment, while in another it hindered the development of alfalfa, clover, and Chinese mustard.

As a guideline, Master Gardener Dr. Linda Chalker-Scott of Washington State University recommends keeping the total volume of coffee grounds in the compost between 10% and 20%. Anything above 30% increases the risk those coffee dregs could end up harming the microbes and earthworms working the pile.

Informal field experiments from the Oregon State University Extension Service found that compost composed of 25% coffee grounds is most effective for maintaining consistently high heat. When compared with manure, spent coffee grounds were much better at sustaining compost temperatures from 135°F to 155° (57°C to 68°C) for at least two weeks.

The post 6 Compost Accelerators to Fire up Your Pile appeared first on Rural Sprout.

I’m not a huge fan of worms. While everyone else is waxing poetic about the fresh scent after a good rain, my nose picks up the scent of dead worms. And I’m not a fan of stepping around their dead bodies on the sidewalk the day after either.

Don’t even get me started about how they crawl onto the road at night in a heavy downpour.

Gross.

However, I made my peace with these wriggly little composting machines when I began to see all the amazing benefits of adding worm castings (a fancy name for worm poop) to my garden and houseplants.

For more information about these benefits, you’ll want to read my post about why worm castings are nature’s best soil amendment.

I knew I wanted access to worm castings without having to run down to the garden center to buy them by the bag.

I needed a worm tower.

But I took one look at the prices of a few pre-made worm farms (admittedly, some of them are quite stylish!), and they sent me running to grab my toolbox and a few old 5-gallon buckets I had laying around.

Using 5-gallon buckets, you can easily build a practical worm tower with very little effort. It’s an incredibly economical set up too – the whole thing costs a little under $15.

Those big-box hardware stores (you know, the blue one and the orange one) have 5-gallon buckets for around $3.50 apiece. And the lids are usually around $1.80 each.

Or, if you don’t mind putting in a little extra effort, you can easily build a worm tower for free.

Check around the garage and garden shed first. You might already have three buckets and a lid sitting forgotten in a corner somewhere. Just be sure you use ones that haven’t been home to harmful chemicals previously.

If you turn up empty-handed after searching all the cob-web covered corners of the garage, call a local restaurant. Many will happily save their empties for you for free.

As someone who has collected food-grade buckets from restaurants for various purposes over the years, I can share a couple of tips.

• Local mom and pop places are more likely to save buckets for you than a chain.
• Delis and hamburger joints are great places to pick up 5-gallon pickle buckets.
• Be polite, offer to check back daily or have them call you when they wish you to pick up the buckets. Taking the buckets off their hands as soon as possible means they are more likely to help you out again for your next DIY project.

Making a worm tower won’t take long either. You don’t need to save this project for a weekend afternoon. You’ll have the whole thing done in under twenty minutes.

Materials

Aside from your three buckets and a lid, you’ll need the following:

• An electric drill with a 3/16” or ¼” drill bit
• Paper bags, newspaper, or dried, fallen leaves
• Water
• Worms, lots of worms

How Many Worms and Where to Get Them?

You can easily pick up worms for your tower at any place that sells bait. Red Wigglers and Canadian Nightcrawlers are excellent composting worms. If you don’t know of any bait stores near you, check out your local Walmart. They usually carry worms back in a small fridge in the Sporting Goods section.

For a fun time, pick up a few other weird items while you’re there and see what kind of questions you get from the cashier. When I purchased the worms for this tower, I bought nine tubs of Red Wigglers, a pack of paper party straws and lime Jello.

The cashier just looked at me, with one of her eyebrows doing its best to crawl up into her hairline.

I smiled and offered no explanation.

You’ll need around 250-300 worms for your tower. The worms themselves will set you back around $25-$35 depending on where you get them.

You can, as with anything these days, buy live worms on the internet. There’s a good Amazon listing here from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm, but it’s always best to source locally – especially for a live product like worms.

Of course, you can always do it the economical way and wait for a good rainy night. Go out with a flashlight and a bucket and grab the nightcrawlers that come up out of the dirt everywhere.

(Gross.)

You may have to do this a few times to get enough worms.

Making the Worm Tower

Drill eight holes around the top of all three buckets, right near the lip. This will give you plenty of airflow for each bucket.

Next, drill holes all over the lid; again, this is to make sure you have plenty of airflow, so your farm doesn’t get too soggy.

Take two of the buckets, flip them over and drill holes all over the bottom. Keep your holes around an inch to an inch and a half apart.

You’ll notice you have lots of prickly burs on the other side of each hole. These will need to be removed to keep from harming your wiggly friends. This is a little time-consuming but fairly easy to do.

Grab a drill bit that’s a few sizes larger than the holes and put it in your drill chuck. Going from the opposite side, you drilled the holes gently and slowly, running the tip of the drill bit over the top of the hole. You don’t want to drill a bigger hole; you just want the tip of the bit to scrape any burs away.

See? Much better, nice and smooth.

Once you’ve drilled all of your holes and cleaned off the burs, you’re ready to add your paper and your worms.

The bottom of your worm tower will always be the bucket with no holes in the bottom. Into this bucket, place one of the buckets with the holes in the bottom.

Now, place a layer of shredded paper bags, newspaper, cardboard (nothing shiny or coated), or dried leaves into the bottom of this bucket. The layer should be about 4-6” thick.

Water this layer well; you want the paper to be good and damp. Once you’ve finished, you may need to pull this bucket from the bottom one and dump out any collected water.

Start adding your worms. They will burrow down into the paper waste pretty quickly. They’re a pretty anti-social bunch.

You can also begin to add kitchen scraps too. Drop in any sort of vegetable kitchen scraps, but no meat or dairy or oils. Worms also don’t do well with coffee grounds or citrus either.

Maintaining Your Farm

Add new scraps as the previous additions disappear.

Occasionally check the bottom bucket for worm tea. (Also known as vermicompost tea.) I love saving this for my houseplants. You can add it to your watering can to give your garden and houseplants a boost.

Once the second bucket begins to fill up, and the scraps break down, add the third bucket to the stack. Again, filling the bottom of this new bucket with another 4-6” layer of wet paper and scraps and replace the lid.

The worms will migrate from the second bucket to the third, where the food is.

After a week or two, swap the second and third buckets. Scoop out the worm castings to use in your garden and on your houseplants. The second bucket is ready to go to keep the process going, swapping buckets as needed.

Within a few months, you’ll have a decent supply of worm castings.

If you find yourself needing compost even sooner, give the Berkeley Composting Method a try. It yields a decent pile of compost within two weeks.

If you had asked five-year-old me what I wanted to be when I grew up, “a worm farmer” would not have been in my top 100 responses. And yet, here I am, currently the proud owner of three vermicomposting setups.

They are cheap to make and easy to look after.

My hungry little worms consistently turn my kitchen scraps into the most amazing soil additive I’ve ever used. And now you can put some worm castings to good use around your garden too. How many towers will you start?

The post How To Make an Easy DIY Worm Tower for Under $15 (or FREE!) appeared first on Rural Sprout.

But often, getting good compost can take a long time. Cold composting can take up to a year to see decent results. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this method. If you prefer a hands-off method with minimal upkeep, the good ol’ cold compost heap is the way to go.

Vermicomposting also produces excellent results but can take several months, and even hot composting takes several weeks to a couple of months to produce a good product.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a nice pile of compost ready to go in a couple of weeks?

Enter the Berkeley Composting method.

This method of hot composting, developed at the University of Berkeley California, maximizes microbiotic activity to produce high-quality compost in only 14-18 days.

The materials needed are easy enough to come by, so once a pile is finished, you could easily set up another batch and have compost ready every couple of weeks.

If you had a great need for compost, you could even start a couple of piles, each a week apart, so you’re continuously creating compost.

Benefits of Berkeley Composting

1. Lightning Fast Compost

I think the biggest benefit is obvious – it’s lightning-fast. No other composting method can produce results this fast. You start with a large pile of raw ingredients, and in two weeks, you have beautifully decomposed compost ready to add to your garden.

2. Killer Compost

Berkeley composting kills nearly all plant diseases, insects and their eggs and weeds and weed seeds.  In the end, your finished product won’t be harboring the problems from a previous season.

3. No Special Bins or Gadgets Needed

You need very little in the way of special equipment to get started, and the materials used to make the compost are common and plentiful. Berkeley composting is an incredibly affordable option.

4. Compost Pile? What Compost Pile?

One of the other benefits I think is less obvious – it’s not permanent. You don’t have to have a dedicated compost pile that draws flies and takes up space year-round. You don’t even need a compost bin. Skip the journey down the rabbit hole that is Pinterest looking for a DIY compost bin that will fit the bill.

As I mentioned above, with the Berkeley composting method, you can easily keep the cycle going, continually producing compost. Or you can make one batch of compost to use at the beginning of the season and be done.

Think about how easy it would be to make compost once at the beginning of the growing season and then be done. There’s no fussing with worms or a cold compost pile the rest of the time. For many folks, this is the perfect composting setup.

Let’s jump in, shall we?

We’re going to cover a lot of information here, and it may seem a bit overwhelming. However, I think you’ll find that once you get the basic concept down, Berkeley composting is quite simple to do and requires a minimal amount of daily effort.

We’ll start with a brief rundown of how the process works; then, we’ll dive into the specifics of creating your first pile.

Berkeley Composting In a Nutshell

You’ll be creating the perfect environment for the naturally occurring microbes present in decaying matter to do their job quickly and efficiently.

Using a specific ratio of carbon to nitrogen raw material, you’ll build a one cubic yard pile or bigger (or fill a bin) and add water to create and maintain the necessary heat for quick decomposition. Unlike a traditional compost pile, you won’t be continually adding to it as the process occurs. You’re going to mix everything together at the start.

After a day or two, the microbes will kick into high gear. You’ll turn the pile daily to ensure all parts of it spend time in the center where the heat is.

After 14-18 days, you’ll be left with a much smaller pile of broken-down compost that’s ready to be applied to your garden.

It really is as simple as that. Now we’ll move onto the finer details you’ll need to complete this two-week process.

Tools

First thing’s first, you’ll need a pitchfork, a garden rake, and a tarp to cover your pile once it’s set up.

If you choose, you can set your pile up in a bin. Bins are great for holding in the heat, but using one isn’t necessary if you want to keep things simple.  

You’ll need a bin that’s large enough to accommodate at least a cubic meter of raw material. Some folks suggest using two if you go the bin route, as you can turn the pile into the second bin every other day, rather than trying to turn the pile in the confines of the bin.

And that’s all you’ll need as far as tools.

Assembling Your Pile

Next, we’ll create our pile. You want to remember these four key features when assembling your pile:

Big Pile, Small Pieces

To maintain the high temperatures needed for the rapid breaking down of the raw materials, you need a large pile. It should be one cubic yard – 36” x 36” x 36” at the bare minimum. In this scenario, a little bigger is better.

However, while you need the pile to be large enough to hold in heat, the pieces of the materials you use need to be chopped or cut very small. A good rule of thumb is ½” to 1 ½” pieces. This gives the hungry microbes plenty of surface area to grow and do their job.

Soft items, like grass or food scraps, can be a bit larger because they naturally decompose quickly. Harder or woody items like twigs from a pruned tree or cardboard need to be shredded or chopped smaller. Another good rule of thumb to follow is the harder the material, the finer it should be chopped.

Carbon to Nitrogen – 30:1

The materials you will be composting have to be a specific mix of carbon (brown) and nitrogen (green) rich materials. The nitrogen-rich materials are where the heat comes from. The ratio of carbon to nitrogen should be around 30:1.

I know what you’re thinking; how do I measure this?

As my grandmother would say, “It’s guess, and by golly.”

On the whole, if you’re using plant-based materials for both your carbon and nitrogen, volume is the way to go. Usually, the same volume of green plant material per the same volume of dried plant material will give you the correct ratio.

“Green” or Nitrogen-Rich Materials

• Grass clippings
• Dead headed flowers
• Clippings from green pruned trees and shrubs
• Weeds
• Fruit and vegetable scraps, including eggshells
• Fresh manure from non-meat-eating animals – goats, chickens, horses, cows, etc.

“Brown” or Carbon-Rich Materials

• Corrugated cardboard (skip anything that has wax or is shiny)
• Paper – copy paper, newspaper, napkins, paper towels and plates, coffee filters, etc.
• Dried corn stalks
• Fallen leaves
• Dried pine needles
• Sawdust
• Straw and Hay
• Wood chips or shredded tree bark

Obviously, this is just a small list to get you started. There are plenty more green and brown items which can be composted. If you have something you’d like to add to your pile, I suggest doing a quick internet search to determine if it’s a green or brown.

A Note About Using Copy Paper and Newspaper

If you’re going to use paper, be sure it’s shredded finely and mixed well with the green portion of your pile. Otherwise, the paper can mat, and you’ll have pockets of your compost pile that isn’t getting any oxygen. No oxygen = death to your happy little microbes.

The Big Squeeze

Once you have your raw materials together, combine them to create your large pile. An easy way to do this and assure you get a well-mixed pile is pitchfork one scoop from the browns then one scoop from the greens all into one large pile.

Now we need to water the pile. Give it all a good soaking, being sure to get all parts of the pile wet. The amount of water needs to be fairly specific, roughly, soaked through about 50% of the way.

An easy way to gauge if you have enough water is to pick up a large handful of your compost mixture and squeeze it hard; only a drop or two of water should come out.

If you didn’t get any water droplets out, add more water. If you squeeze out a fair bit of water, you will need to spread your pile out for a few hours to dry before heaping it all back together.

Keep it Covered

Because you went to all the trouble to get the water just right, you’ll want to keep it that way. Cover your pile with a tarp. You can tuck the edges in under the pile or place a few large rocks around the edges.

Covering your pile serves a couple of purposes; as I stated, it keeps the pile saturated the way you want. If it rains, your pile won’t be overwatered, and you won’t lose precious nutrients.

Keeping the pile covered also helps to hold in the heat. Remember that’s the key to getting the materials to break down quickly.

Tuck in your compost pile, mark day one on your calendar and call it a day.

Checking In

Check your pile about 24 to 48 hours after you start it. By now, the microbes should be happily making you a pile of compost perfection, which is to say you should notice considerable heat coming from your pile.

Since we’ve been ‘all thumbs’ up to this point, let’s continue the trend – a good rule of thumb is the elbow test; stick your hand into the middle of the pile, up to your elbow. It should be hot enough that it’s uncomfortable to keep your hand in the pile.

Of course, you can also use a compost thermometer or an infrared thermometer, but you don’t have to use any of these special gadgets. The magic number seems to be around 160 degrees F; any hotter and you kill off your microbe buddies, any lower, and they slow down.

Great! Now we start turning.

Turning

Every day after the first 24 to 48 hours, you’ll be turning your pile. Using your pitchfork and rake, you want to move the outer parts of the pile to the inner parts of the pile where the most heat is. This ensures your microbes get plenty to eat and that all parts of the pile have a chance to break down.

This is the ‘hard part’ but remember, it’s only for 14-18 days and really, it only takes a few minutes to do.

Once you’ve finished, don’t forget to tuck your pile back in.

Finishing Up

For the first week, your pile will continue to cook, breaking down all the raw materials. Once you get to your second week, the pile will slowly begin to cool off as decomposition slows down and your pile has become compost. Continue turning every day.

By day 14, your pile will have reduced in size considerably, and the organic material will be dark brown. Voila, nearly instant compost! Your finished compost is ready to use right away and will continue breaking down over time in the soil.

Troubleshooting

Nearly all issues with Berkeley composting can be attributed to one of three factors. If you fix these, then your compost should be right as rain. Any issues that arise will usually add a day or two to the overall time it takes to compost your pile.

Not Hot After 24 to 48 Hours

Your pile is either too wet or too dry, or there isn’t enough nitrogen. Do a squeeze test and adjust the water as necessary.

If the water is fine, it has to be the nitrogen. A quick way to adjust the nitrogen is to add fresh grass clippings; however, any other “green” item will work. Mix it all up, cover it and check it again after another 24 hours have passed.

Too Dry

If your pile is much cooler on the outside and very hot on the inside, it’s probably too dry. Add some water, and do the squeeze test.

Too Wet

Similarly, if your pile is hot on the outside and cooler in the middle, your pile is too wet. Leave the cover off your pile for a few hours.

Carbon to Nitrogen Ratio is Off

If your ratio is off, you’ll know it. Things will start to break down very quickly, and you’ll begin to smell ammonia. (Your pile is losing nitrogen.) Mix a finely shredded carbon/brown (sawdust is a great option for balancing your ratio) into the areas where you can smell the ammonia coming from. This should correct the imbalance.

Signs of Success

You know you’ve got a good reaction going if you can feel the heat coming off of the pile, and it has a slightly pleasant ‘warm’ odor to it. You may also see water vapor coming off the pile when you turn it or see white fibers of mycelium developing. You’ll also notice the pile is shrinking.

Berkeley composting is one of those things that sounds hard until you try it. Give it a go. I think you’ll find yourself using this method time and time again as you need compost at the ready.

If you want to learn more about other composting methods, I recommend checking out Elizabeth’s guide to Hot Composting, How to Start Your Own Worm Bin, or perhaps learn how to make a DIY compost bin for a cold compost pile.

The post How To Make Compost in 14 Days with the Berkeley Method appeared first on Rural Sprout.