Organic Composting

Organic composting is taking recycling program that keeps on giving and giving...

Here's how it works: Eat fresh fruits and vegetables. Throw the leftovers in a compost bin or a worm composting bin. Stir. Water. Wait. When the compost is ready, it becomes food for your garden. Your garden grows and flourishes. It feeds you. You compost the scrapes and start all over again.

 

Starting the Cycle

To begin with, figure out where you could put a composting bin (outside). You can make simple composting areas with a bit of chicken wire and a few posts or you can buy fancy ones of all shapes, sizes and price ranges. Some make composting easier (they tilt and turn so you don't have to stir the stuff yourself), or more pretty (some tidy little container verses a cylinder of chicken wire), but they all accomplish the same goal: Turning your scraps into useable 'food' for your garden.

After you've located a place for your bin and decided on which kind of bin you'll use, you can start making composting a habit. Put a pail or container with a lid under your kitchen sink and scrape all your organic food into that pail. Once a day (or however often you decide) empty the pail into the composting bin.

Occassionally add water, newspaper, grass clippings, etc. and stir it a bit. Nature will do the rest for you. In 3 months or so, you'll have new super charged soil to add to your garden.

Do's and Dont's of Adding to the Compost Bin:

Do Add:	Don't Add:
Leaves Grass clippings Fruit and vegetable scraps egg shells coffee grounds Newspaper Wood ashes Used coffee filters and tea bags Pretty much any organic material that decomposes	Dog/cat feces Large branches meat or cheese (to keep from attracting rodents) Grains (they can be composted, but they get pretty stinky sometimes) Fats Sawdust from plywood (it contains glues that aren't good for you or your bins)

Would you like to make a homemade compost bin that's both free
and easy to put together?

Here's a simple way to get rid of flies in your compost bin.

And ways to control odor in your compost bin.

Have you ever thought about starting a worm compost bin?

See this list of 163 things you can compost...
there's sure to be things on the list that surprise you!