Come Here, Compost…

By the local corespondent Inaya Sinha

First of all what is compost?

I have gathered the material and information for this post from a YouTube video. I have changed the lines and sentences to make them my own.

Well, compost is leaves, grass, kitchen scraps, wet coffee powder and natural things that you would find around your garden. After that, you put them in a pile together and over time it decomposes and mixes with the soil.

Now, how do you make compost? First, you need to gather some raw materials, like dry leaves and kitchen scraps, for example, egg shells. You just don’t want to have any meat or dairy in your compost. You can also put coffee grounds. The best way to get coffee grounds is to go to a cafeteria and ask them for some coffee grounds. They usually throw it away.

Also, if you trim trees in your garden, then you take the leaves and branches trimmed. Or, if you have a gardener, then you can ask them for it.

The first tip for making compost is to build a large pile. A large pile will get hotter. Hotter weather breaks down the compost faster, which gives you free black gold for your garden!

If you have a hard time collecting a bunch of materials at once, you can definitely build a small pile. Often small piles don’t heat up they stay cold and can take about six months, or even up to two years to break down into compost. And since we want compost fast, we need to make it big.

Now, the maximum size of a compost pile is about three feet wide and three feet tall. The second tip to make compost break down faster is to use the rights materials. Two main materials are browns and greens which doesn’t refer to the color of the material!

Browns are carbon rich materials and contain dry leaves and dry grasses, twigs from your garden. Greens on the other hand are nitrogen rich materials such as food scraps from your kitchen, clippings from your garden, coffee grounds including coffee filters and tea bags. These add essential nutrients and help your compost pile heat up.

Now, when the time comes to putting the materials into your compost pile, a good mixture is one part of greens and three to four parts of browns. Don’t get too carried away in doing this, it does not have to be exact.

Tip three. The smaller materials you use the better. For example, you can shred your dry leaves or you can run a lawnmower over it, you can put your food scraps in the blender if you really want to blend it.

Now that we have all our material ready and collected, we are just going to lay it out in a sack, if you have one. Or, you can put it in your yard - backyard, front yard, where ever you want. Just don’t put it in your balcony! If you do, it will really stink!

Now let see the layers of compost. First, you put a layer of dry leaves. Now tip four. You need to keep your material moist. In doing that, you can add some water to it. You do this so that when the compost is done, it will come out light and fluffy.

After that, you mix it in together. Now that we have our browns inside it is time to put in our greens. You need to put in the coffee grounds. Now you add a little more water. Then you put the kitchen scraps and the stuff that you trimmed in the garden.

Tip five is to give it air. There are little microbes in compost and air is like food for them and giving them air also does another job. It also makes it light and fluffy.

Now you keep mixing it all together. So you keep doing the same steps again and again. In a few days you check your compost - either with a compost thermometer or with a piece of rebar, to see if it is getting hot.

And that, my friends, is how to make compost,