Making Your Own Compost

09 December 2009

Making your own garden compost is easy but you need to follow a few simple rules:

To breakdown, the compost needs to have air, some water content and a balance of sappy (lawn cuttings, potato peelings etc) and dryish (twigs, egg boxes, straw etc) filling.

Compost is created by the action of microbes eating away at the vegetable matter in your compost bin. These microbes work frantically and as a consequence create a lot of heat.
Typically the temperature will rise to hand hot within a few days. Unfortunately for the microbes, the heat they create kills them. But after they die a different lot of microbes take over. They work much, much more slowly and can take up to a year to convert your vegetable matter to black crumbly compost.

So, for a faster turn around, lift your compost bin and put all the content back in regularly to keep the fast microbes going and add dry material if the compost appears too wet and wet material if it’s looking too dry.

You can also add compost accelerators – look out for our range in store.

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