Composting at home can not only be a way to use up all those household scraps while making good garden soil but also a way for the family to be doing something together while helping our environment. Composting at home is something many people are doing today as means to use up all those food waste products so they don’t’ have to further fill up landfills. Composting at home may seem difficult and messy but it’s actually relatively simple once you learn how it’s done. It’s actually easy for us because it’s nature that does all the hard work. We just do the preparations. The worst part of composting at home is the waiting, especially when you have children helping. They have a hard time believing that all those leftover fruit and vegetable peelings will actually turn into nice black rich compost soil. The waiting is definitely the hardest part for them as it may take anywhere from six to twelve months.

You’ll want to have a small composting bin inside your kitchen so you don’t have to be running outside every time you have some leftover scraps. Vegetable and fruit peelings, coffee grounds and filters make perfect composting materials. Avoid using meats, bones or salty greasy foods. Your bin should have a cover to avoid awful smells in your kitchen. You can make your own kitchen compost bin with a pail with a cover or purchase a kitchen bin for composting at home.

Once your kitchen compost bin is full, take it outside to where your other large composting bin is located. Your outdoors composting bin may be a pile on the ground, a large metal drum or a commercial composting bin. You will need to have more than just the scraps of food in your outdoor bin. You need moisture in your bin to help the process of decomposition, which is what composting is all about. Add other dry ingredients for nitrogen. These may include, hay, straw, grass clippings or chopped leaves. The more sun your ingredients get, the better they’ll heat up and decompose. Add water from time to time to keep the compost pile moist. It should be moist but not soggy. It should also be turned occasionally, perhaps once a week. If you see ants on your pile, it may be a sign that it’s too dry.

The most important thing for successful composting at home is to have the correct amount of ingredients. Live any living thing, in order to live, they need moisture, air, food and warmth. If you keep this in mind are tend to your compost pile regularly, your composting at home project will be quite successful and you’ll wonder why you didn’t start it sooner.

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Composting has become very popular in recent years. People’s reasons for composting vary from a way to save on gardening fertilizer, a fun pastime, a way to help the environment and for the best fertilizer ever. You’ll need some composting equipment if you’re going to be making your own compost. There are many kind of composting equipment depending on what type of compost you’re going to be making. Composting equipment can be inexpensive items you already have around your home or they may be expensive commercial items.

Some of the composting equipment you can purchase for your composting adventure includes compost thermometer, compost turner, organic compost, compost starter, kitchen compost bin as well as miscellaneous items.

The compost thermometer makes it easy to always know the temperature of your compost pile. This stainless steel thermometer will help you keep your compost pile at the warm temperatures it requires to “cook” and also has three temperature zones. It shows temperatures up to 200F. The compost turner is perfect for helping you make sure your compost get turns as often as is required, which will make compost faster because the aeration of the turner speeds up the decomposition process. All you do is put the turner in the compost, gently lift it out and watch the hinged paddles mix and aerate the compost pile. This is one of the handiness composting equipment items you’ll own.

Organic compost is not only a great addition to put on around your plants, trees and shrubs, but also helps speed up the process in your own composting bin. It has just the right amount of soil builders to give your compost pile the boost it needs. Compost starter will help give you the most moist and rich humus you could want and in less than 90 days. It contains the perfect blend of microorganisms that add nutrient energy as well as break down your waste materials faster. It is made specifically to help speed up the process of decomposition and works well with wood chips, lawn clippings, pine needles, brown leaves, etc.

Although the kitchen compost bin is not a necessity, it definitely makes a nice addition to your composting equipment collection. You’ll always have a spot to store your food leftovers that are going to wind up in the compost bin outside. This is an attractive piece of equipment that will keep in the odors and lessen the trips back and forth to the compost bin each day.

If you are a beginner in composting, you may want to start small like composting worms. This is simple, fun and requires a minimum of composting equipment.

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Having animals like horses can be a lot of fun but after awhile you’ll have quite a pile of manure, which not only looks unattractive but can be smelly as well. If you’ve had your horses for a few years, you can look inside the pile of manure and you may be surprised to find some very black “dirt”. This means that you’ve been composting horse manure without even realizing it. Even without your help, your horse manure will compost on its own. However, when it composts on its own like this, you’ll have a lot of unpleasant odors around the area as well as promoting flies and parasites that are harmful to your horse or horses. Not to mention, composting requires a lot of warm temperatures to be successful.

In large manure piles, the center may be composting, but not the sides because of the lack of warm temperature and mixture. Composting horse manure can eliminate a lot of these problems while giving you some excellent soil for your gardening needs. Many people pay a lot of money to buy horse manure for their gardens and you’re lucky enough to have it there giving you the opportunity for composting horse manure for your own needs.

There are many reasons for composting horse manure besides the obvious, which is to reduce the odors and eliminate parasites. It is also a great way to lessen the size of your pile each year. You can also sell the compost soil you make by composting horse manure on your farm. Composted soil is a lot more sellable than straight smelly horse manure. People are going to be a lot more willing to pay good money for black rich dirt than they are for a pile of smelly messy manure. It’s also much better fertilizer for your flower bed or vegetable garden.

The soil you’ll get from composting horse manure will improve the aeration in your ground as well as retain water better. If you’ve ever tried to grow certain crops in hard soil, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Compost from composting horse manure is soft and drains well while it retains the water. Another advantage of composting horse manure is the many nutrients you’ll be spreading on your field or putting in your garden. Each year your soil will be better and better for growing crops. The benefits of composting horse manure are high and numerous. A composting pile consisting of horse manure and leaves, hay, sawdust, etc works well for your project and will give you some excellent soil for years to come.

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Leaves have always played a fun part in the lives of children. We all remember raking up leaves and jumping in the leave piles. Beyond that, many of us don’t remember what happened to the leaves after we’ve had our fun in them. Very few of us remember composting leaves or watching our parents composting leaves. Because the value of these leaves was not as familiar as it is today, leaves were often thrown out or left on the lawn. Things are much different today with the world all on a goal to help save the environment. Today composting leaves is a part of many people’s lives, not just for ecology but also as an excellent mulch and fertilizer for their garden.

Although many of us are unaware of this, tree leaves have more than double the amount on minerals as manure. In fact, approximately $50 worth of humus and plant food can be found in the leaves of a large shade tree. Because of the deep roots, the trees get their minerals from deep in the ground and a large part of these minerals goes into the leaves. If you have a lawn sweeper, collecting these leaves will be a breeze, otherwise; give your kids a treat and have them rake them in a pile. Either way, you’ll want to start composting leaves for some of the best soil your garden has ever seen. Composting leaves is so easy you’ll wonder why you’ve never done it before.

As easy as composting leaves is for some, others complain that they have difficulty. Their biggest complaint is usually that the leaves don’t break down into compost as they expected. Two things that may help to make your composting leaves project more successful are to add nitrogen to your leaf mixture and shred or grind your leaves. The best nitrogen supplement is manure. Mixing a ratio of one part manure to five parts leaves will help your leaves to break down much quicker. If you live in an area where manure is unavailable, bone meal, dried blood or cottonseed works well. If you use the commercial substitutes mentioned, a wheelbarrow of leaves with two cups of mixture works well for successfully composting leaves.

Working with shredded leaves is much easier than whole leaves. You can make your compost pile any size you want but rectangular shaped piles seem to work best. Put down a layer of leaves approximately six inches deep, followed by a two inch layer of organic material. The organic material may be grass clippings, manure, garbage, or old vines from your garden. Ground corn cobs, straw or sawdust also work well with the above ingredients. Mix the leaves from time to time so they stay moist, but you don’t want them soggy. Turn or mix the pile around once a week and you’ll have an excellent collection of leave compost.

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Composting plants is a great way to dispose of your dead plant material along with a great way to create a thick and rich fertilizer or soil conditioner. When you are composting plants you are helping the natures circle of life to continue on with the help of mankind. If you are not composting your dead plant materials you are only taking away from natures own energy source that helps to keep the Earth alive. By composting plants, you are putting back into nature what your plants have taken away from it to stay alive throughout their life. When you are composting plants you can use any one or even more than one of numerous methods of composting.

If you compost your yard waste you are composting plants. Whether you are composting your grass clippings after mowing the lawn or if you are composting brush picked up from around the yard after a storm or in the spring you are still composting plants.

Even if you compost the dead, dried up or damaged leaves and foliage from the plants in your flower bed you are helping the environment by returning what you have taken away. After you have weeded your yard, flower beds and garden if you place the removed weeds in a compost bin you are aiding Mother nature to retain nutrients and energy that you have removed from it.
Composting plants can mean a lot of work for you, usually performed in your extra or spare time. Although, this is not an activity free relaxation period most people do consider it to be relaxing.

A few types or methods of composting are worm composting, dog waste composting, composting of leaves, composting plant material, composting bins, composting animal waste, composting food waste and sheet composting. These are only a handful of the numerous composting types or methods available to use, but they seem to be a handful of the most popular methods of composting.
For composting plants you can use many different sources of compost material. Some of these sources include grass clippings, flowers waste, brush, tree branches, leaves, garden waste, dead foliage, fruits and vegetable waste from your home, dead plants from your home and plant material in general.

You will want to avoid placing any glass, plastic or metal of any kind. These are not made from plant material and are not biodegradable. You will also want to stay away from meats, dairy, oily foods and grains. These compost materials can cause your compost bin to have a foul odor and attract insects and rodents.

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Compost is an excellent additive for your garden or flower bed. It’s also one of the best mulches and soil supplements. In addition, it’s cheap and easy to make. Everyone has most of the things they need to make compost right in their home. There are many places you can go to find some composting tips to help you get starting making your own compost. If you’ve ever started a garden or flower bed for the first time, you know how costly it can be to start off when you have to be buying potting soil, top soil, fertilizer and other miscellaneous additives. Why go through all this when, with the right composting tips, you can make your own compost and save money?

If you’ve ever read up on composting tips, you’ve probably heard and read how great compost is for gardens because it increases the soil’s water retention qualities, loosens hard soil and improves the texture, structure and aeration of soil. You’ll have a steady supply of potassium, nitrogen and phosphorus always going into your soil with compost. You may not notice a huge difference in your garden the first year, but each year it will get better and better. Following are some composting tips you may find very helpful if you’re just learning about composting.

Any kitchen scraps you have should not be thrown out but should be added to your compost pile. Most compost bins or piles are kept outdoors, although a smaller one is kept in the kitchen for convenience. When the small one gets full, it’s emptied into the larger one outside. Heat, which your compost pile needs, will build better in a large pile but try not to make it larger than 3 feet by 3 feet. Make sure you have a cover on your compost bin to keep odors from entering your kitchen. Avoid throwing in bones or meat, but other foods that are excellent are coffee grounds and filter, egg shells, vegetable and fruits scraps.

Once you discover you’re really interested in starting a compost pile and still have questions, the internet is loaded with composting tips such as these as well as your local library or extension office.

Make sure you keep your compost pile aerated either with a compost aerator or by hand. In order for your pile to heat up and break down, it needs to be periodically turned so it can get the oxygen it needs. Every time you add something new, you need to switch it around. Make sure your compost pile stays moist as it will not break down if it’s too dry. However, make sure it doesn’t become too wet, either. The more variety of bedding materials you have, the quicker it will break down so try to avoid having only one ingredient. Make a mix of leaves and grass clippings or some other similar ingredient. Hopefully, these composting tips have been helpful for you in your new hobby.

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A composting toilet is a special system that takes human wastes and converts it into usable soil and organic compost. This process takes place by naturally breaking down the organic matter into the natural essential minerals. This is done by the micro and macro organisms working through the different stages of oxidation as well as the breakdown of anaerobic pockets. Composting toilets may be central units or self-contained composting toilets.

Central unit composting toilets flush the waste material to a remote composting unit located below the toilet, while self-contained composting toilets complete the composting cycle right on the same location. Central units that flush can flush upward or horizontally. The composting cycle can be completed by electricity with fans exhausting air to increase the microbial activity. The use of a rotating drum inside the composting toilet is often used as a way to speed up the aerobic breakdown of the waste.

With all the efforts of the world towards helping the environment, commercial compost toilet systems are beginning to compete with the traditional flushing toilets, especially in public facilities that are used frequently. These composting toilets have been found to be not only resilient but also advantageous to the environment because there are no pollutants being discharged. Large businesses that have begun using composting toilets are pleased with the results and state if the bathroom is kept clean with properly working fans, no one can tell the difference between these and conventional flushing toilets.

Composting toilets, regardless of what kind they are, all need to have some of the end product removed occasionally. If the composting toilet is a full-size one, it may not need to have the solids removed for many years provided the volume of the tank is at least three times what is put in the toilet in a year. The reason for this is because the liquid decreases in volume over time, for example; only about 2% or less of the original amount is still there after 5 years. After this time, it becomes a mineralized soil and is done decomposing. Smaller composting toilets, however, will need to have the solid waste removed a couple times each year.

Composting toilets are, surprisingly enough, becoming used more often in homes because they prefer the odor-free process provided by the efficient compost toilet over the conventional flush toilets which use large amounts of water and, in turn, drain large amounts of sewage. Composting toilets, which are odorless as well as waterless, are preferred in areas known for drought. Homeowners in these situations are able to stay in their homes during drought. They are also recommended in public facilities in areas of limited water supply. Composting toilets are also being tested for certification to ANSI/NSF-41 Standards.

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Composting with worms is a method to recycle your unused food that would normally be thrown away. Recycling unused food garbage by composting with worms yields an earth scented soil conditioner that is rich in nutrients. This method of composting can be done year round either indoors or outdoors. In addition, composting with worms provides people in the confines of an apartment a way to recycle their food waste into rich compost.
To perform composting with worms you will need a container that equals about one square foot of surface area per weekly pound of food waste. Your container should be made of either plastic or wood. Wood seems to be absorbent of the excess liquids created by the fermenting process combined with the worms digestive process. Your container needs to have holes drilled into the bottom for aeration, venting and moisture drainage. You container must also have a cover to help provide cool, dark conditions for the worms.
After you have acquired a container, you will need to furnish the container with a layer of bedding. This is where the worms will live and to bury food waste. For bedding, you may use shredded newspaper or cardboard, sawdust, seaweed, chopped straw, dead plant material, shredded aged and dry leaves or even mature compost or aged manure. You must moisten any dry bedding materials used before adding them to the container. The bedding should be moist like a wrung out sponge, filling about three quarters of the container and loosely packed with air pockets for odour control and ease of movement for the worms.
Next, you will need worms. The two types of earthworms that work best for composting with worms are Eisenia foetida, also known as red, red wiggler, brandling or manure worms and Lumbricus rubellus, which are often found in mature compost and aged manure.
Finally, if you keep your bin for composting with worms indoors you will want to store your compost bin in the basement, under the sink or any other warm dry and dark spare space that is between 40-80 degrees F in temperature. If you decide to store your bin for composting with worms outdoors, you will want to store it on the patio or balcony, in the shed or garage or even in the yard out of the hot sun or pouring rains. Anytime the temperature drops below 40 degrees F where your bin is stored, it must be moved inside or insulated well.
If your bin for composting with worms is set up correctly, there will be little or no maintenance beyond dumping the composted contents every 2-3 months.

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The two types of composting worm that are best suited for worm matured composting are the Eisenia foetida or red worm and the Lumbricus rubellus. The Lumbricus rubellus is found in aged manure and matured compost. Do not use dew-worms. Dew-worms are the large sized worms found in soil and compost. Dew-worms are not likely to survive.

Where do you obtain your composting worm, you ask. If you feel like getting dirty, locate an animal stable or farmer with manure pile then collect a bag full of manure with worms. Also, check your or a friend’s compost bin. You can also purchase your compost worm.

How many composting worms do you need? It has been suggested the correct worm to food waste ratio is two pounds of worms to every pound per day of food waste. This adds up to roughly 2000 worms. If this is too many worms to start with, reduce your food waste accordingly and add food waste as the composting worm population increases.

Do your worms require feeding? In basic terms, Yes! Compost food scraps like tea bags and coffee grounds, fruit and vegetable peels, and pulverized eggshells to add to your compost bin as composting worm food. Do not compost dairy, meats, grains and oily foods because of odor problems, insects and rodents. Do not attempt to compost. Plastic, glass and tin foil are not either digestible for any living being nor are they biodegradable.
Lift and pull aside some bedding then dump or add your food waste followed by burying it with the bedding to cover it up. Burying the food waste will help you to avoid any insects or odor problems. As you add food waste, bury it in a varying pattern inside of the bin from one addition to the next to avoid any bulky areas that your composting worm is not able to navigate through.
It will take between 2 and 4 months to collect and for the worms to eat and digest enough food waste along with shed their skin in your composting worm bin to reach composting maturity. As your composting worms eat and digest the food waste leaving it behind in the form of composting worm waste with the skins they shed your compost bin will slowly mature. Over a period of 2 to 4 months, your matured compost bin will transform into a thick, dark and rich soil conditioner. This soil conditioner may be used with household plants and indoor green houses or collected over a period to be used in outdoor flowerbeds, gardens or yards.

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Composting worms has become a great way to not only help the economy but also get some great fertilizer. In fact, composting worms will give you the some of the most effective fertilizer you’ve every used. Another term often referring to worm compost is vermicompost or worm castings. Composting worms is easy, fun and will help you have the healthiest plants you’ve ever raised. About the only items you’ll need for composting worms are worms, bedding, worm food and a bin.

You don’t need a large bin to begin composting worms, in fact, anything from 8″ to 16″ deep is sufficient. Many use a shipping crate, dish pan or old washtub. You can also buy a commercial worm bin. The important thing is to have a lid to keep out rodents and flies and also have holes in the bottom for drainage and ventilation. A good idea for an appropriate bin size is two square feet of space per person. The bin for composting worms should be in a shady space as worms like moderate temperatures. The patio, garage, laundry room or right outside the back door all makes good choices.

Newspaper torn into strips one inch wide will make excellent bedding. Moisten the newspaper so it’s like a damp sponge. You can also put in horse or cow manure to absorb any excess moisture. Add a few handfuls of soil to the moist newspaper and you can add the worms and food. Every couple of months, it’s a good idea to add crushed eggshells, soil and ground limestone for calcium and grit. This is how composting worms begin. As time passes, the worms will eat the food and bedding, turning it into worm compost.

Most people composting worms choose red wigglers or red worms, which can be purchased at a worm farm. You can also find them in old compost pile. Red wigglers and red worms both do very well in confinement and reproduce quickly. They also have a big appetite so always make sure they have sufficient food. In fact, on a daily basis, they’ll eat more than their own weight. If you’re just starting out with your composting worms’ project, one pound of worms is more than enough. Worms are not picky eaters and enjoy the same things we enjoy. Some of the do’s and don’ts include: no bones, meat, fats, dairy products or greasy foods. Do compost fruit peelings, vegetable scraps, tea bags, bread, coffee grounds and filters, grains, crushed eggshells and non-greasy leftovers. Start them off with just a small amount of food, increasing as they get older.

You’ll need to harvest your worms at least two times a year and can start after you’ve been feeding them 3 to 6 months. A quick method of harvesting worms is to move all the contents to one side of the bin and put new bedding in the empty space. For the next month, put your food wastes in the new bedding. Once the worms have all moved to the new bedding, you can take out the worm compost. The compost you get from composting worms is great around plants, spread 1 to 2″ thick.

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