Feed the Garden with Green Waste
If you want to save money and have a thriving garden, don’t throw away the green waste! Just make yourself a compost pile and throw it there. Compost has many benefits for your plants as an organic alternative to fertiliser. Grass cuttings and pruned branches won’t be enough to make a healthy compost mixture, but the other ingredients are readily available in your household as it is.
The Answer is Compost
Compost returns energy back into the soil, by supplying it with much-needed bacteria and fungi that are depleted with continuous gardening at the same spot. This in turn attracts other beneficial life forms such as worms and crickets. Most of these soil fungi depend on a symbiotic relationship with plant roots, which enables your plants to feed more efficiently. Compost also aids plants in dealing with common diseases, which plants grown in the sterile environment have problems with. Compost will also help your garden to retain moisture better. If you are serious about your garden and are not composting yet – Now’s the time to start. It is more cost-efficient than fertiliser and will also minimise the output volume of household and green waste.
What do you make compost out of?
This is where the role of your garden waste comes in. The two most important elements in compost are Nitrogen and Carbon, or Greens and Browns respectively. The perfect ratio between the two being 1 part Nitrogen to 25 parts Carbon.
Green ingredients:
fruit scraps / vegetable scraps / grass clippings / seaweed & kelp / weeds / coffee grounds/ cuttings
Brown Ingredients:
straw / hay/ leaves / dryer lint / wood ash / clean sawdust / cardboard / shrub prunings / corn cobs / shredded paper
Do Not Compost:
meat/ dairy / glossy magazines and prints/oil stained sawdust/weeds / diseased plants/anything containing synthetic materials
Turning Green Waste Into Compost
Generally speaking, there are two ways:
Cold composting
It’s as simple as layering green waste from your garden and food waste from your kitchen and letting it decompose in peace. This method typically takes around a year to produce usable compost.
Hot composting
Hot composting is achieved when water and air are added to the mixture in such a way that microorganisms can develop more rapidly, in turn speeding up the process of decomposition. A healthy compost pile has a temperature of around 60°C. The benefit of this is that the temperature of the pile kills of any dormant diseases or weed seeds that may have invaded the compost pile. Hot composting produces ready to use compost from 1 to 3 months, depending on the size of the pile.
Paul’s technicians will gladly take care of the yard clean up for you and share their expertise on any questions you might have.