These 8 Free Ingredients Will Bulk Out Your Compost Bins

Can a gardener ever have too much homemade compost? I think not, but sometimes it's hard to create the quantities that we're looking for to supply our growing spaces. So in this video, I'm going to give you a bunch of fantastic ingredients, almost all of them you can get for free, that you can use to bulk up your at-home compost production. So yesterday, this compost bin had a lot of beautiful homemade compost, and I've emptied it out, storing the compost in a separate area, to show you just how quickly you can start building up volume in your bin. Just before we run through the list of ingredients to bulk up a compost bin, if you happen to be making compost for the first time, a really good starting point is to create a fairly thick kind of base layer using a very fibrous kind of woody material. This is old nettles, for example, but you could use something like old twigs and branches, because what that's going to do, it's going to create air pockets and make sure that there's oxygen underneath. And it's this oxygen that is really important for helping the microbes, which are going to be breaking down the rest of your material. So that's the base layer complete, it's now time to look at those ingredients. To kick it off is old or spent compost that you've got leftover from the previous growing season, where you've grown a lot of crops, so it might not have too much fertility, but you can actually recharge this by putting it back into the composting process. Spent compost can also include module tray leftovers from last year, and also hanging baskets. The next ingredient is wool, specifically the wool that comes in packaging, usually to insulate cold food when you're buying it online and it gets delivered. This is actually both an amazing mulch, slugs really don't like this as a mulch, which is another benefit, but also it's a natural material, it's a natural ingredient that you can actually apply into your compost bin. Now what I'd recommend is I'd tear up into smaller bits like this and put that over, or you can actually leave it outside in a pile like I did by accident to start breaking down over a few months and then you can place that on your compost bin. Another fantastic free ingredient to bulk up your compost bin if you live closer to a coastal area is seaweed. This is some seaweed that I collected from my local beach actually this morning. Now there's quite a few kind of rules and regulations that change depending on where you live and what kind of beach it is, so make sure that you're well versed in what those are, but I think every single garden knows just how powerful seaweed is, and it's a great thing to put to add a lot of fertility and nutrients. You might wonder about the impact that the salt from the seaweed might have on the compost bin. If you are in doubt, one of the best things you can do is lay out your seaweed and let a heavy rainfall give it a good kind of rinse and then place it on your compost bin. As we run through the list of different ingredients to add to bulk up your compost bin, you might have a question in the back of your mind with actually how much of a single ingredient is too much. You might have enough seaweed to fill up a whole compost bin. Can I use that? Well to keep it as simple as possible you just want to mix up your ingredients, whether it's mixing them up together with a fork or whether you mix them by applying them in different layers. I personally use layers because usually I'll have a bulk of a particular ingredient. I can just apply a nice kind of two to three inch or you know five to seven centimeter layer of that and keep building up the bin like that. The only other thing really to know about composting is balancing out the greens and the brown materials. So that's the nitrogen and the carbon materials and I keep it very simple. Roughly I make sure that for every one bucket of greens I add about one to two buckets of brown but I don't have enough time to measure it all out. As long as I've got a mix in there I'm going to have successful compost. The next ingredient is grass clippings. Pretty self-explanatory and it's something that you can actually collect at scale especially if you're in a suburban area. Just make sure that you're getting clippings from grass that isn't sprayed with any kind of fertilizers or pesticides. Perhaps the bulking ingredient that excites me the most out of the list is actually decomposed wood chip. The reason why is that for me around here at least it's really easy to get a hold of wood chip however it does take a while to break down. So we've just left it in a pile for a couple of years and it's almost turning into its own compost. Now all I think this needs is a growing season in a compost bin mixed in with a load of other ingredients and this is a fantastic resource to really bulk up your compost bin and it's going to be one of my core kind of ingredients I think moving forward as I try to become more self-sufficient increasing my own compost for the garden. Another great material is cardboard and it's a very easy thing to collect from kind of any small business that deals with a lot of boxes. For example I get a lot of my cardboard from my local garden centre. What I suggest is just tear it up and then give it a good water because it's quite dry it needs that bit of moisture. So give it a good soaking and it's another great thing to bulk up your pile. One ingredient that I haven't been able to source today but it's really easy to get especially in kind of more urban areas is used coffee grounds. Used coffee grounds only have a very slightly acidic pH which means it's basically going to be suitable for whatever plant you're going to grow in your vegetable garden. It's also seen to have quite a high nitrogen content so it's considered a green material and it's also apparently really really good for microbial activity. And the other night I was reading an article by Oregon State University that actually suggested a compost recipe in layers of a third used coffee grounds, a third dried leaves and a third grass clippings and I think that's something I want to try this year. Another absolute must of material are autumn or fall leaves. Now obviously these are mostly going to be in abundance during autumn but what you can do is you can collect as many as you possibly can during that time and bag them up and then you're going to have actually quite a valuable stock of carbon or brown material that you can use to gradually bulk up all of your bins over winter, spring and summer. I truly believe that as an individual composting is one of the best investments you can make. Forget investing in the stock market, creating your own highly valuable homemade compost is one of the most valuable things you can do. If you can imagine saving your vegetable scraps and also your neighbor's vegetable scraps or perhaps a local restaurant's along with all of these bulk items you'll see just how quickly a compost bin can fill up. If you're looking to increase the potential and productivity of your garden tomorrow my new book The Vegetable Grower's Handbook is being published. It is all about finding ways of making your garden more productive and the biggest chapter within it is about soil health and compost. So hot composting, chicken composting, how to make your own microbial amendments to speed up your composting process, all of this is available. So if you found this video useful please do pre-order a copy of that book. I promise there's going to be something in there that you're going to learn and whilst you're waiting watch this video here about why chop and drop is another core tool to use in your garden to improve soil health alongside making your own compost.