Adding assorted food materials to your compost pile is the third and a very important requirement if you want your compost recipe to work well. From previous posts you’ve seen that best results are obtained if 1) there is enough air to provide the oxygen necessary for the bacteria to carry out “aerobic” decomposition; 2) your compost pile is as damp as a wrung-out sponge, and 3) you have a mixture of both green and brown compost ingredients added to your compost pile.

Decomposer organisms work best with as varied a diet as you can feed them. The ingredients are all around us –almost anything that once lived is a candidate for the compost, so try for lots of variety to get a good mix of textures and plant nutrients.

In composting jargon, woody materials that are high in carbon (autumn leaves, paper, peat moss, sawdust, cornstalks, hay and straw, etc) are called “brown” compost material.

Other materials such as garden refuse, manure, tea and coffee grounds, feathers, hair, and food scraps are high in nitrogen, are labeled as “green” compost material.

Some materials can actually be both: for example, fresh grass clippings are “green”; however, dried grass is “brown”.

For successful results, you can use the simple rule that compost needs to be about half “brown” and half “green” by weight. Don’t bother to weigh your ingredients, though — an estimate is fine.

Composting soon becomes a matter of instinct, like the cook who bakes without a recipe. If the pile doesn’t heat up, you know there’s not enough “green” in the mix, but if you get a smell of ammonia from your pile, you know that it needs more “brown”.

Here is a short list to help you understand which foods are “green” compost material and which are “brown” compost material

Anything organic can, in theory, be composted — some more easily than others. You don’t need to have all of the above materials in a compost pile, but the important thing is that you do have an equal amount of green and brown compost material for best results.

The list above is far from complete is far from complete, but common sense suggests a few exceptions. On my next post, I will make a list of the materials which can cause problems if added to a compost pile.

Till then, happy gardening!

Marcie

Produce nutrient-rich compost for your
flowers and vegetables with this neat
backyard composter

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 28th, 2007 at 4:19 am and is filed under Adding Compost Ingredients, Hot Composting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.