21 Composting Tips I Wish I Knew Sooner

There is no such thing as having too much homemade compost so here are 21 composting tips that I wish I knew sooner when I first started composting and they're all ways to help you make the best homemade compost as possible and also how to use it in the best way as well. Now the first tip is the most important one because I'm feeling generous and that is when it comes to your ratio of green and brown materials most people over complicate it okay the ratio doesn't matter too much very often people say kind of like two parts green to one part brown but you can make beautiful compost with two parts brown to one part green or one part brown one part green. Now that sounds confusing what is a part well you could kind of just think of it in terms of volume so every kind of bucket full of green material I put in I want to put in maybe a bucket full or two of brown material but what I actually find is as you're putting things in during the growing season a lot of it starts to dry out so I've got some like dry material here which is kind of acting as a brown so really you can get away with pretty much making compost just by putting loads of green material onto your bin in a nice steady progression over the season and you don't have to worry about anything else. Now the next tip is and this is very very simple the smaller the pieces are the faster that they're going to break down the reason why is when you take say a leaf into smaller pieces there's so much more surface area for the microbes to get to work for earthworms to pull down and eat and digest whereas if you're just putting kind of like bigger bulkier bits without chopping them up yes they're going to break down but they're going to take that much more time think of it like eating food if you don't chew and you just swallow it's going to give your stomach some issues whereas the chewing process is like what you're doing here with chopping up is actually providing that first stage of decomposition. Now one thing that is quite fun to do is if you do have some ready-made homemade compost this is full of microbes and what you can do is actually spread it over your new compost bin just to help inoculate it with some microbes to help the decomposition process. Now one of the things you can do and I'm not going to do it quite for this pile because it's still got a lot of fresh material but after say once I've finished filling this if you just turn your pile once which means kind of moving the inner core materials out the outer edges and the things on the outer edge into the center that's going to speed up the finished decomposition by about four to six weeks so instead of maybe waiting anywhere from a pile like this maybe about eight to nine months you're going to take one to two months off that for finished compost which is just a very simple thing to do you don't have to turn it as well a lot of people think you have to and it puts them off composting because it does take physical effort but if you need compost faster just by introducing that oxygen to it is going to help kick-start all the microbial activity and ensure a nice consistent breakdown. One of the biggest mistakes that some people make when making compost is that they use compost bins that are too small they might be using something like the Dalek compost bin and whilst it can be effective it can just take so long because the issue is is that when something is smaller there's less of a kind of a critical mass in the center so the secret to a good compost is for it the compost bin to be at least 90 by 90 centimeters ideally one cubic meter in size or three by three foot and larger because it means that there's enough critical mass to create a core in the center that is full of warmth and heat whereas if you have quite a small compost bin there's a lot less insulation and it's not going to get to those higher temperatures in the center so it's just going to take much longer to break down. As you're filling your pile if there is particularly hot weather it can actually dry out the top and you don't really want that because when there's not enough moisture it really slows down the decomposition as well so during heat waves it's actually worth going through and giving a really good watering to your compost bin before you then add another layer on top so the top layer will almost always act like a cap. Now once I have filled this compost bin then what you want to do is either cap it with something say like a load of leaves or like a thick mulch of grass clippings or even a load of cardboard just to help prevent the evaporation of the moisture inside to keep the moisture locked in in the same way as maybe mulching your plants that helps lock the moisture in the soil you also make sure you want to lock the moisture into your compost bin and that's also going to protect it over the winter months from extreme temperatures and weather. For those of you who haven't maybe yet made a compost bin don't make the mistake of putting a compost bin in the sunniest corner of your garden right now it is the morning so it feels kind of sunny but very soon this is actually the shadiest part of the garden so for most of the day this is in shade which means it's not prime growing conditions for everything that I want to so the best thing that you can do in shady spots of your garden is put your compost bin there or you can do other things like the other part of my garden where there's another little shady spot is I put my water storage there so when it's not prime growing location it is prime composting or storage location. Now a lot of people say that composting is taking up so much space but you know you're missing out on growing space even though it might be in the shadiest part but it's actually a great opportunity using something like a pallet to create a location for hardening off any of your seedlings or for storing extra pots and seedlings where you might be running out of space in the polytunnel so it means I can make sure that I put out all of my seedlings here because that's like vital space that I can bring out from the polytunnel harden them off here for about a week or so and then I can transplant them into the garden. If you don't need more space to store your seedlings and you have also filled up your compost bin what you can do is create a little hole put in a couple of spadefuls of compost and plant a squash in the center and allow that to grow so you actually turn the compost bin into a raised bed in a sense but you want some kind of like winter squash that can ramble and and take over the whole space because they are a bit of a brute so that is well worth doing. In the same way we're itching to to see when a tomato is ripe there were certain cues to knowing that tomato is ready it smells nice and fresh and there's a bit of give in the skin and it's turned full color but how do you tell that compost is ready because sometimes you can get compost that looks ready but it isn't ready because it has that kind of real kind of almost like nitrogen smell. What you're looking for again use it you want it to look very nice and crumbly to begin with but you've got to take a good whiff of your compost and it should just smell like a nice forest floor nothing more there shouldn't be a strong smell to it it should be a nice forest floor and that is when you know that it's ready to be used with your plants and there's no danger of it burning your plants. If you're much of a fan as I am with compost you might have noticed that I have chosen a brown shirt to pair with compost so let me know if you noticed that it wasn't just a accident. The other thing is is if you don't know and if you're trying to look at how to do the best composting and make things like supercharged compost in six weeks and learn about making hot beds which is an amazing way of generating compost and a huge amount of food simultaneously. I do have a composting course that I've got with Penny Etiquette and Jack First and there's a little little discount code down below in the video description just for you guys just for this video which you can enjoy and use the rest of the growing season to generate loads of beautiful compost for next year. We've looked at the basics of what's required tips wise for making really good compost here are a load of other tips that are going to help supplement that and build upon that. The first one is right here in front of me I've got this plant called comfrey. Now this variety is called bocking 14 so a lot of people like oh no don't grow comfrey in your garden it's going to absolutely take over. Well bocking 14 is a variety that is sterile so it can't spread through seeds which is great. Now I've planted this comfrey at the base of this hot bed area and if your compost bins are on a bit of a slope plant comfrey at the base on the downhill side because what comfrey does kind of in nature acts the roots are really deep and the roots act as a bit of a net to capture and soak up any of the nutrients that are running off from your composting area. Now the first year that I planted this comfrey which is spring last year I got four harvests from it and it produced so much biomass that I could either use to create and activate my compost bin by putting in a load of comfrey that is going to get my compost bins absolutely thriving. The other thing that I can do with it though is make liquid feeds like comfrey feeds to help reduce my requirements of using compost for all aspects of the garden. So plant some comfrey at the base of your compost bins because it is just going to help you benefit even more from all of the material that you're putting in that otherwise some of those nutrients could be lost out of the system. Now if you only have a small space one of the best places to make compost is actually in your pathways so here's a little extract from a video that I've done before about pathway composting which is a brilliant way of producing a lot of fertility without compromising any of your growing space whatsoever. So all of these buckets are filled now with compost and it is a lot if you think about each bucket being 30 litres of compost we've got 11 buckets here that's 330 litres of compost that you've made. I reckon there's probably an extra I don't know 20 if I really wanted to to scrape out the dregs but that's a huge volume of compost to produce from a pathway that is three metres wide. It was also very satisfying and very easy to just scoop up all of the material and put it in the bucket. A really important point that I need you to know and some of the tips of focus on this with compost is that compost is the way I use it in my garden is a precision tool so I don't always use it as a blanket solution if I have excess I will mulch my beds with compost but I use it where it's needed. There are certain things that I might want to put a load of compost in if I'm growing things like squash or tomatoes because they're hungry but actually for a lot of things I don't need to put compost down every year like here I've got peas which are a legume so they help fix their own nitrogen to help them grow. I've got things like leafy greens this vegetable mallow and then you've got herbs and flowers like this borage there's nasturtium down there as well they don't need loads of compost so if I actually know what I'm going to be planting in my beds that year I actually know that this bed had enough compost from last year which meant I didn't need to add excess compost and instead I've actually mulched with a certain type of wood chip ramiel wood chip which is great for growing vegetables in so being kind of purposeful about where you use your compost actually means that the precious compost that you make can go a lot further. The other thing that took me so long to realize is that composting is not just exclusive for doing it within a contained area like a compost bin or a pile one of the best things you can do is compost in situ and this is what happens in nature nature doesn't gather all of the material up into a pile break it down and then spread it all over the garden again whilst that is useful for gardeners that isn't how nature works and we can we can play with that a little bit so here I've got some like goosefoot and some other weeds that are starting to grow through so I'm just chopping them down to the base chopping them nice and small and I'm actually just going to leave this here so what I'm doing in a way is composting in situ I'm breaking up this plant material into smaller kind of amounts leaving it on the surface of the soil and when plant matter is on the surface of the soil it's actually going to break down much faster than say putting it into a compost bin and it's going to activate soil life to bring it down and it also helps me out with keeping moisture in the ground over the growing season adding the nutrients adding the organic matter it is well worth doing so don't just think you have to do everything in a compost bin or even in your pathways if for example you don't have any material that you can chop and drop what you can do as well is bring in material to mulch so I've got some grass clippings from the lawn which means when it's managed with the lawn there's a lot less weed seeds in it and I can place this around this Australian tree cabbage not just to retain all of the moisture to help this grow nice and strongly but also this is going to it's in contact with the soil or the microbes the earthworms things like that and it's going to gradually over the growing season completely decompose into the ground provide it with a huge amount of nutrients without me having to use any compost whatsoever so again it's making the compost that I do make so much more kind of useful as and when needed rather than having to stretch out all of the to tick off every single job or plant in the garden which is why so many people feel like they never have enough compost but there's actually clever ways like this to reduce that earlier in the video I mentioned that if you're just gradually putting plant material from the garden onto your compost bin and some of that's going to dry out as you're adding more that's fine you don't need to worry about greens and browns but if you're creating hot compost you actually need all of your greens and all of your brown material in one place ready to put together in the same compost making session so the two things that you can do is to just store up brown materials the simplest thing is if you've got lots of grass you can dry out grass and store that in a dumpy bag to use as and when the other thing that that penny uses which she uses for her supercharged compost in the course she actually uses sawdust because it's very very fine but it's very very high in carbon so she uses that as her carbon source of course you can use other things like autumn leaves but that is just a really kind of key tip is if you want to make hot compost so you've got compost ready in about six to eight weeks from now the the the thing that people really miss is actually realizing they don't have enough brown material for this video I was really thinking what are some of the things that have transformed the composting side the most and one of them is actually not just having one compost bin it's so tempting to have one compost bin in the corner you'll see that I have two here the reason why is sometimes you're going to either fill a compost bin and then you're going to have all of the material and you might not know where to put it and also you're waiting for compost to break down and you might have run out of compost so in this compost bin I've actually got half a bin full of finished compost that I need that I can use as and when so there's security in that and it means that this can have time to break down by the time this is finished this will have broken down and then I'll start filling this up with material so it's just kind of working as a pair to help make sure that I have access to compost consistently throughout the season and not kind of run into any bottlenecks one of the coolest things about any kind of compost structure is that there's an opportunity to use it as a trellis to grow things up so here I've actually I've got peas that I'm going to grow up but I'm going to encourage them to grow out and along the fence here the outside of the hotbed just to occupy that vertical space because it is there it's there for the using that you're bound to have one slightly brighter sunnier side of your compost bin so just use that as a trellis to grow up maybe some semi-dwarfing peas or some beans or even some cucumbers the most liberating thing that I've experienced as a gardener is significantly reducing how much compost I need for my beds now I know I mentioned earlier about chop and drop and also mulching with material such as the grass clippings I'm going to get some comments of people saying what about slugs so if you're concerned about slugs this is the tip that I'm going to give to you which is in late autumn mulch all of your beds with things like grass clippings leaves chopped up seaweed if you're close to a beach and leave it over winter because by March about 90 percent of that is broken down so it's not kind of impacting the slug season and you can plant directly into it and you've got this beautiful rich chocolate cake like soil without any compost whatsoever that is so healthy pumped with nutrients pumped with microbes to help your vegetables grow so if you want to learn more about that there's this video here and I promise you it's going to really help with making your whole garden more productive