"Organic Garden Compost
Saves Money and
Is Better For The Environment"

Why spend money buying more and more fertilizer to grow less and less? You can use organic garden compost to produce your own tasty and healthy organic food.

Organic garden compost is easy to make and provides a good source of plant nutrients very economically. It serves as both fertilizer and mulch - feeding plants, helping to retain moisture and improving the soil.

1. A basic organic garden compost method
2. The Biodynamic composting method
3. A video about another simple method

There are also a number of very good books about composting. You will find links to information about a few of the best ones a bit further down this page and a wider selection on our Food Gardening Bookstore. Of course, there is also one very specialized composting method. The process of making mushroom compost has been developed over a long period of time for just one specific purpose - Growing Mushrooms.

One thing you may notice is that none of the options above involve the use of compost bins or tumblers.

Many people (myself included) have a compost bin in the backyard and, yes, this does produce compost, but mostly these bins seem to end up becoming a kind of environmental garbage-can for kitchen waste.

However, a compost bin can still be a useful thing to have, since a lot of compostable material from the kitchen and garden tend to come in fits and starts. By contrast, building a compost heap requires you to have everything at hand to begin with.

I find that my compost bin fills slowly and when it gets to the stage when I can't fit any more in, only about the bottom third is in a fully composted form. The rest goes back into the bottom of the bin again. On the other hand, all this material is great to use as the bottom layer of a new heap.

Basic Garden Composting

This is the method I use in my own garden. There are a lot of refinements to it, but even without them, you can still get good organic garden compost.

First - some basics

For example, lawn clippings have a very low C:N ratio (about 7:1), so you could turn them into useful compost by mixing them with something like straw that has a high ratio (about 100:1). Using alternate layers of these two materials so that the sawdust layer is about one-third the thickness of the lawn clippings will give the heap about the right overall C:N ratio.

Another way is to use a general rule-of-thumb such as: 3 part leafy green to one part woody or brown stuff, however, this generally oversimplifies things a bit.

Adding Nutrients to the Compost

It is also sometimes necessary to add some nutrients to make up for any shortfall or imbalance in the material being used, if you are going to consistently produce good organic garden compost. For instance, compost made from pine bark often requires added Iron. However, the most common nutrients required in compost are Calcium and Sulfur. For this reason, Gypsum (Calcium Sulfate) is a common inclusion in the preparation of good quality compost.

This is in contrast to the common belief that Lime (Calcium Carbonate) should be added. The problem with Lime is that it raises the pH and this is not always a good thing as composting proceeds best with a moderately acid pH.

Of course, there is no reason why you cannot include animal manures in your compost. This will ensure there are plenty of nutrients for your plants.

My Composting Process

As there is usually a lot of stuff available, I tend to select the most completely decomposed material to use in my vegetable garden. The rest goes into the new compost heap.

Throughout the season I add layers of straw, interspersed with lawn clipping and leafy waste from the garden so there are complementary layers with alternating highish and lowish C/N ratios.

Each leafy layer gets a generous sprinkling of gypsum and the ‘straw’ layers a get a generous sprinkling of some sort of animal manure.

By the end of spring, the heap has become quite large. While building the heap I usually do not need to water it at all, but by this time it will need to be thoroughly turned and mixed. It will then need another month or two to ‘cure’, so the compost won’t be ready until the beginning of autumn.

For this reason, I often start a second heap and build it up through the summer. This way, when the first heap is ready to use, the second heap can be turned and left to ‘cure’ over winter for use the following spring.

For this reason, I now tend to use the bin to help build up a supply of material that will form part of the heap when I am ready to build one.

While I like to have the compost heap built, as much as possible, with materials from my home and garden, I usually need some other stuff as well. This helps to improve the consistency of the compost produced and ensure a sufficient volume is available.

"The World's Best Compost"

Organic garden compost is naturally the best stuff to use in growing the best quality fruit and vegetables. But proper composting can be a bit involved. "The World's Best Compost" is the title of an e-book describing the biodynamic method of composting, but the book gives you much more than just a recipe on making compost.

It also describes why it is important to learn how a plant really feeds and how compost works to help plants do this. And it goes on to compare this to the way fertilizers work and why there should be no need to keep pouring on expensive fertilizers if you use good quality organic garden compost.

One unique aspect of this method is that is also does not require the hefty turning and mixing of the heap that is typical of all other composting methods. You build the heap and cover it - then just wait!

An important consequence of this is that the compost can be stored for up to 12 months in its finished state - you start using it at on and and re-cover the heap when you have finished.

The other unique aspect of this method is that it does not produce the usual crumbly, friable compost that other methods do. The end result has more the consistency of brown putty, which has implications for how the compost is used.

Normally, large amounts of compost would be either worked into the soil or mulched over the top of it. In this case, relatively small amounts are spread over the soil and immediately turned under.

Large amount of this compost would actually harm plant growth by reducing the ability of air to penetrate to the roots. Fortunately, the colloidal nature of this compost makes small amounts extremely effective.

By learning to make this special kind of compost you will be working with nature not against it.

The one thing that is common to every composting method - including this one - is that you need to start by choosing the right materials and combining them in the right proportions.

What are the best materials to use
for organic garden compost?

Most of us need to invest a lot of time and effort working this out largely by trial and error. Others work with various rules-of thumb and try not to worry about whether the quality of the compost is as good as it may be. But using the Biodynamic method of composting helps you avoid all this.

In fact, this may be one of the most important things you will learn when reading this excellent e-book on making organic garden compost.

This video also gives a good, practical description of the composting process.

While you are here, you should also subscribe to The Food Gardener, our regular email newsletter. This will keep you informed about new information and developments in making and working with organic garden compost. It will also tell you about news at www.food-from-the-garden.com, as well as gardening tips and results from our food garden research projects.