Starting Your Own Compost Pile
Having a compost pile is very important for any avid gardener, making all of your plans run more smoothly. If you are just starting out with your garden, and still don’t know what you need to do in order to get high quality compost, then what follows is a simple guide for any amateur.
Composting is essentially a waiting game, whereby you wait for your waste materials to decompose, and become suitable for plant growth and your gardening purposes. Simply put, you place all of your waste materials, such as animal and human waste (if you want to go that far), food waste, garden waste, really anything which contains nutrients and is biodegradable. One great way of immediately shortening the waiting period is to mix some ready made compost, which will be full of the necessary micro-organisms. Having done this, various factors come into play, which will have bearing on how valuable your compost is. The two biggest, and most easily accounted for variables in this process is oxygen and temperature. It is important to think of composting as an act of cultivation, only instead of plants, you have bacteria. This means that you need to ensure that the bacteria in your pile has all of the things necessary for life, so that they can propagate at their optimum level. The easiest way of ensuring a minimum level of oxygen exposure is to periodically turn the pile, so that everything gets equal exposure, and so that the pile can be oxygenated.
Having a warm compost pile can also significantly speed up the process. Although heat isn’t entirely necessary for the process to finish, it can shorten the time involved significantly. Keeping the temperature of your compost pile high can be done through various methods. By ensuring that the moisture content is high, and by making a heat trap, you can quickly turn a slow process into one which will be over within a week or two.