The Big List (What you put in your compost)

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Permalink Reply by Glenn Fletcher on May 24, 2009 at 5:14am

Chris
i add the following items not noted in your conventional compost list.
Privet Hedge clippings. These are brilliant, i think they are one of the things that have the perfect 30:1 carbon nitrogen ration on their own. We have privet hedges along both sides of our long thin garden, which we cut about three times a year.
My sons hair. In times gone by "shoddy" or waste wool products were an important natural fertilizer. So we cut our sons hair with electric clippers and it all goes in the heap.
Processed weeds. Perennial rooted weeds like bindweed & horsetail i dry for about 12 months to make sure they are nice & dead. Flowering weeds like dandelion & chickweed i drown in a large tub of water for 6 to 12 months. This makes a horrible stinking black soup, but i think it is quite a good activator. [ High in Nitrogen]
Wilted Comfrey leaves. I grow comfrey around the perimeter of my allotment garden. Its roots reach down for goodness in the subsoil.
Rotten Straw. Farmers around our area leave large circular bales of straw in laybys to stop gypsies camping there. These eventually start to rot from the inside out.
Mouldy groundnuts. We have a large skip delivered to the allotments every three months for rubbish collection. Someone had dumped a 56lb sack of old groundnuts [peanuts in shells] These did not compost very well at all. I was digging up peanuts in their shells for years afterwards.
Basically i work on the principle that only diseased vegetable material should be disposed of. Everything else can be recycled given time.

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Permalink Reply by Gillian on May 24, 2009 at 4:20pm

Thanks for these lists, good idea! I think the main thing that I need to keep adding is air! Maybe because I am in such a hot and humid climate I find the bin easily gets compressed. It is hard to get all the way to the bottom with a garden fork, but if I mix the top part then it seems to treat the bin as two separate areas and I am able to pull composted material out of the bottom, which also adds air to the bottom of the bin. At last I seem to be getting it to work!

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Permalink Reply by Glenn Fletcher on May 25, 2009 at 5:20am

Gillian
Thats one advantage of using the two bin method. When i chop the material out the first bin [ when the heating part is over] and throw it into the second bin, air gets added. I also get the chance to add more water [which you don,t seem to need]. This appears to make it a better environment for the worms to come in and colonise, and finish the compost off.

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Permalink Reply by Gillian on May 31, 2009 at 9:29pm

Glen,
yes thanks for the advice. I think there are subtle differences depending on what area you live in. For the last month or so I have been treating my compost a little differently. I did get another bin as you suggested. I took out most of the already composted stuff about a month ago, and put it into the separate bin - that has broken down over a month into lovely crumbly sweet smelling stuff. Then I have been digging little bits out the bottom of my bin and digging that into other areas of the garden, this adds air so that I dont have to tip the whole bin over to mix it up. I read in a local australian gardening book not to break down the compost too much before adding it here as things break down so quickly in this climate as it is. Seems to be working fine. I want to leave the whole bin now to compost without adding to it, so dug a trench to pile in the food scraps that accumulate in the meantime. Covering and layering with torn up cardboard to stop flies. I am amazed at the quantity of compost that I can produce in this way!

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