Composting For The Frugal Garden
Gardening can be one of best ways to put food on the table when on a budget. However, you can’t save money if you put more money into the garden than the money you save on your food bill. One of the best ways to cut cost is to create your own compost. Composting is great for our soil, helps the environment, and is easy to make.
A large problem when starting a garden is poor soil quality. Many people spend a lot of money buying fertilizer to feed their plants and then they spend a lot of time bagging leaves and throwing them away. I laugh every time I see someone loading bags of compost and fertilizer in their vehicles at Home Depot. These are the same people who throw away their leaves, grass clippings, and food scraps. When one uses their own material to make compost, the soil will be more productive. Compost made from raw organic material enriches the soil by encouraging the good bacteria and organisms to flourish and feed the plants. Most commercial fertilizers are expensive and can kill most of the live bacteria in the soil. While it helps your plants grow, it does nothing to help the soil. This causes the need to add more and more fertilizer every year. With compost, you get happy soil rich in nutrients that feeds your plants year after year. Compost also encourages the good bacteria that fight off most plant diseases. You also get healthier food out of your garden.
When you send your leaves and organic waste to the landfill, you are affecting the environment. When you use commercial fertilizer, you are causing harm to the ecosystem and the wildlife. By composting, you save all the extra waste and you enrich the ecosystem with natural organic material that is needed.
Composting is very easy and only takes a small effort to achieve results. The basic recipe is two parts carbon rich material to one part nitrogen rich material mixed with water. The pile needs to be wet like a wrung out sponge but not too wet. A popular method is to stack the material in layers like you make lasagna; carbon first then nitrogen and so on to your have a good size pile. Then you need to make sure it is good and wet. If the pile heats up in a day or two, you know you have a good pile, if not add a little more nitrogen rich material and that should do the trick. Also make sure the pile is not too wet. If it has a strong smell of ammonia, than you have too much nitrogen material just add some carbon material. The more you turn the pile; I do mine once a week, the faster you will have compost. The pile needs air and if it just sits without turning, the bacteria slows down and it slows down the whole process. A good compost pile should be ready in about a month, faster if you turn more often, slower of you don’t turn it very often.
I like to cover my compost pile to prevent too much water from rain. This prevents all the nutrients being washed into the ground and keeps the pile from being too wet and slowing or stopping the decomposing. Another idea is to take PVC pipe and drill holes in it and put several throughout your pile. This helps keep the air flowing and reducing the need for turning the pile. When it is all finished, the compost should have a rich brown crumbly look to it; like a very healthy looking soil.
Composting is great for a garden; it saves money, helps to reuse waste, and makes for a happy soil. You can compost in a small area, so never say you don’t have enough room. There are many compost containers on the market that will fit in any yard and are quite attractive. Do yourself and your garden a favor and start your own compost pile and join the many frugal gardeners around the world.
Here is a small list of material safe for a compost pile:
Nitrogen Rich:
- Leftover garden plants
- Grass Clippings
- Weeds (ok if you use a fast method of composting)
- Veggies
- Melon rinds (chopped up and buried)
- Fruit peels (chopped up and buried)
- Manure from most livestock (not pets or human)
- Coffee Grounds
- Algae/ Moss
- Sea Weed
Carbon Rich:
- Dried Leaves (best to run over with mower first or chop up)
- Corn Stalks /corncobs (chop up first)
- Newspaper (shred or tear into pieces)
- Cardboard (shred or tear into pieces)
Things not to use:
- Human waste
- Dog and cat feces
- Meats and fats
- Dairy products