Yard Composting

A lot of municipalities will collect your yard waste, grass, leaves, and small branches. This is wasteful as all this material can be used on your plants around your yard. All of this can be used to compost or mulch in just a matter of months. All you need brown materials like leaves, branches and twigs. For your green material grass will most likely be the one you have the most of, but you can also use coffee grinds, and vegetable and fruit waste. By doing this you can reuse your waste. All you need to do is combine these materials into a pile. An ideal mix of materials is about 30 to1 ratio of browns to green.

You will want to find a spot that doesn’t dry out too quickly and has good drainage. You can either have it as just a pile or you can get a container to surround it. I prefer the latter as I find it easier to contain the pile, plus it looks a little more aesthetically pleasing to my neighbors I assume. My county was nice enough to provide these free if you picked them up. They aren’t great and if they were a little more rigid they would be great. Though you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth and they get the job done. When you have your pile started the temperature should be warm between 90 and 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

What I usually do is take all the leaves at the end of the season and mix it in with the last grass clipping from the fall. Then I let it sit over the winter, maybe stirring it when the weather allows a few times. By spring I start mix in more grass and other materials and start to stir the pile more often. I will also use the water from rain barrels to keep the pile nice and moist to help facilitate the decomposition of the material. By early summer I will typically combine the 4 bins I have to 2 and when I stir them I will rotate them from one to the next. By the middle of fall the bins are usually in good condition to be used.

You will find a lot of different recommendations as to how to maintain your compost pile. I have some sites below listed that I have found useful during the years. Doing a compost pile is a lot of fun and is an easy to give a little back to your yard.


Some Other Resources

http://www.mendorecycle.org/compostingBkYard.html

http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/rrr/composting/by_compost.htm

http://www.diylife.com/2008/04/14/create-a-compost-pile-in-your-backyard/

Pictures of my Composting Piles