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Organic Home Garden

Composting

Five easy steps to help your environment from home:

1. Collect your food scraps in a bin/bucket

2. Gather a composting pile in a secure area outside of your home

3. Make sure you have the perfect ratio of browns and greens

4. Mix your composting materials

5. Use your soil for gardening 

Browns

  • fall leaves

  • pine needles

  • twigs or bark

  • straw or hay

  • corn stalks

  • paper (newsprint paper)

  • shredded cardboard

  • coffee chaff

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Brown materials for compost are carbon-rich, slow to decay, strong, dry, bulky and take up space. 

Brown Leaves

Greens

  • coffee grounds

  • fruit & vegetable peels & cores

  • eggshells

  • grass clippings

  • tea leaves

  • freshly picked weeds

  • plant clippings

  • seaweed

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Green materials in compost are high in nitrogen to support protein development. They tend to heat the compost pile up.

Food Blogger

The Ratio

The composting ratio, brown to green, is generally accepted to be 25:1. Since green matter is nitrogen rich, the carbon rich brown matter balances it out. A well-balanced compost pile must maintain a C:N ratio, 25 parts Carbon to 1 part Nitrogen. If you have too many greens, then you could cause the compost to stink. However, if you have too many browns, then the decomposition slows down. This is why it is crucial to maintain the ratio while composting.

What NOT To Put In Your Compost

Some Examples Are:

  • meat

  • eggs

  • fish

  • poultry scraps

  • dairy products

  • oils

  • bioplastics

  • stickers on veggies/fruits

  • glossy/printed paper

  • rice

  • sawdust

  • citrus, onions or garlic scraps

  • chemically treated lawn scraps/plants

Tips

  • Aerate as much as you can to stimulate microbes and avoid odor

  • 40% - 60% moisture. The moisture is essential because it helps break down the organic material. 

  • The temperature should remain between 80 - 120 degrees Fahrenheit

  • Don't forget to remove produce stickers

  • Don't be alarmed by fungal growth - they are essential to the process

  • Turn the compost often

  • Shred some of the materials - especially the brown materials

  • Add an activator such as alfalfa meal to your compost - speeds up the process

  • Use your compost for fertilizer

Image by Neslihan Gunaydin
Black Soil
Image by Martin Sepion
Image by Markus Spiske
Organic Compost
Image by Markus Spiske
Image by Markus Spiske
Image by Markus Spiske
Empty Hallway

What We're Doing For Our School

This Is How We Can Clean Up Our Community

Our group is in the process of creating a composting system in the Holliston high school. The plan is to place two composting bins in the school's cafeteria and then a composting pile behind the school's dumpster. The purpose of our composting system is to get the student's involved and to educate them on the importance of cleaning up their community. Reducing your carbon footprint is a concept a lot of high school student's need to comprehend if they want their planet to have a promising future. 

School Bus
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