Composting is the best and most cost-effective way to create nutrient-rich soil for your garden, though it does come with its challenges. For example, if you compost diseased vegetables or plants, they’ll spread to your garden. If you aren’t turning your compost, it can become unbalanced, smelly compost, and attract critters.
Though, if you do take care of your compost, it’s much cheaper than buying it and certainly easier than hauling it. Creating your compost also gives you ways to reduce food waste by putting it back into the earth instead of a plastic trash bag.
Composting certainly comes with the stigma that to compost, you’re either a farmer or living off the grid, but if that were true, there wouldn’t be so many barrel-turning and countertop composting appliances available to buy. Everyone from gardening hobbyists to apartment dwellers is composting for their backyard, patio, and balcony gardens. Food gardening is most definitely mainstream, and composting comes with it! If you want some luscious, healthy soil for your garden, that is!
If you have a little bit of land, it’s easy to create and tend to a compost pile. But composting can seem elusive for apartment dwellers and those in more urban areas without a lot of space. In the last several years, a number of approaches to easy composting at home have emerged, and you don’t need a lot of room for them to work. A small patio or a spot on your porch is all the space you need to compost. In some cases, your compost bin can fit on the back of your kitchen counter!
In the articles below, we dive into all of these approaches to composting, and you can learn more about gardening and composting in our How to Grow a Vegetable Garden: 10 Things Every Gardener Needs to Know Before Starting a Food Garden freebie. Enjoy!
It’s a Friday in late June, a perfect midsummer’s eve for some leisurely yardkeeping. In my world, cocktail hour is garden hour, and unwinding from the workweek by reconnecting with the ground I keep is a pleasure, especially at this time of year when the plants are intoxicated with new growth. I start by mowing […]
If you’ve read much about compost, you know it shouldn’t have too much of an odor. And if you’ve been composting for more than five minutes, you also know that sometimes, no matter what you do, your compost smells like ammonia or sulfur. If you haven’t experienced this “lovely” phenomenon, you either will soon, or […]
It’s a bright, breezy Saturday, first week of June—a fine time to be a backyard composter here in southern New England. I wander outside to check up on my pile, first scaring off the resident robin couple that tromps across the top in search of worms and other snackables, then disrupting a squadron of hover […]
I am sure there’s a systematic way to add to, aerate, and otherwise mix my backyard compost heap in the most efficient and productive way possible, a process with inputs and variables that could be modeled by an AI computer program, spit out, and followed—commercial composters take just such a scientific and mechanized approach to […]
I sometimes feel like a magician when I work on my compost pile. A few potato peels, a bell pepper core, and some coffee grounds go into the pile, and within a few weeks, out comes gardening gold. Learning how to compost has been such a gardening game-changer for me. I’ve saved tons of money by not having to buy soil additives and bagged compost.
It’s the middle of May, and my backyard compost pile here in southern Connecticut is now fully six months old. As much as the first half of its life was dominated by dead brown leaves, the race to its fruition as finished humus will now be driven by mass infusions of hot green grass clippings. […]
If your idea of a fun afternoon is reading academic research papers, just Google “Salmonella in compost.” You’ll get titles like Cascading effects of composts and cover crops on soil chemistry, bacterial communities, and the survival of foodborne pathogens.
I don’t want to write about bugs in compost bins any more than you want to read about it, but it happens, so here we are. Don’t worry; I’m not going to get into the creepy-crawly details. For your sake and mine, we’ll keep it vague. I’m still emotionally scarred from that scene in The Lost […]
Composting is the gift that keeps on giving. I love turning food scraps, cardboard, grass clippings, and other green and brown materials into a usable and nutritious soil amendment. It saves money and the planet. Not to mention trash day is a lot lighter! With so many ways to compost, finding a method that works […]
Pine needle compost might be one of the most misunderstood areas of composting. Sure, there’s some confusion about whether that take-out container is compostable, but when it comes to pine needles, there’s a longstanding assumption that they are too acidic.
