Hey everyone! Welcome back to the homestead. Today, I’m taking you along as I dive into the world of composting. 🌱🔄
Composting is a crucial part of our homesteading life, helping us recycle kitchen scraps and yard waste into valuable soil nutrients for our garden.
We start by adding food scraps, such as vegetable peels, fruit waste, coffee grounds, and eggshells, to our compost. These are considered green materials and provide nitrogen. To balance this, we add brown materials, which include items like dried leaves, straw, cardboard, and paper. Brown materials provide carbon, which is essential for creating a balanced compost mix. We use a 50/50 ratio of green to brown materials in our open compost bin to ensure optimal decomposition.
Next, I demonstrate how we use our standing, spinning compost tumblers to speed up the decomposition process. Compost tumblers are fantastic because they allow you to easily aerate the compost, which is necessary for the microbes that break down the organic matter. After adding the green and brown materials, I water the compost to keep it moist. Moisture is crucial as it helps break down the materials. I then give the tumbler a good spin to mix everything together, ensuring that the compost is well-aerated and decomposes more quickly and efficiently.
I also share some tips on what makes good brown material. Brown materials are typically dry and include items like dead leaves, straw, wood chips, cardboard, and shredded paper. These materials provide the carbon needed to balance the nitrogen from green materials, which helps to reduce odors and speed up the composting process.
Additionally, I discuss how some people manage their compost by moving it through multiple stalls as it decomposes. This method, known as the three-bin system, allows for continuous composting. Fresh materials are added to the first bin, and as they decompose, they are moved to the second and third bins. This process ensures that you always have compost in various stages of decomposition, providing a continuous supply of rich compost for your garden beds.
Whether you’re new to composting or looking to improve your techniques, this video offers practical advice and insights to help you get started. Composting is not only great for the garden but also an excellent way to reduce waste and live more sustainably.
Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more homestead tips, gardening advice, and daily life updates from our beautiful mountain home. Thanks for watching, and happy composting!
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hello um so I am out here taking the compost to the compost bin and I figured I would show y’all um what we have going on we actually have two compost bins we have one closer to the house that’s kind of like a outside compost bin open air I guess you could say and then we have a standing compost bin that spins so I’ll show you our outdoor one real quick and then we can go down to the standing compost the garden all right so this is the outside open air compost bin which was actually here when we moved in um you can tell it’s pretty full uh we still have we’ll probably use this next year um there’s still some eggshells and peanut shells to decompose um but we keep seeing stuff popping up growing through so it’s super healthy um this works really well for us um it’s out here behind this shed um we have some area of cardboard on the side that’s breaking down that we will add to the compost um but yeah this is an easy option for just like a quick compost bin um so yeah let’s go talk about the one down in the garden all right we are out here in the garden here’s our little standing compost mixer um this one’s cool because it has two little compartments I’m going to flip the camera and show you what I’m talking about all right so it has two compartments which is nice cuz you can have one compost going um as far as like breaking down and then you can switch it over to the other side um once it gets to a certain point so um usually people have different stalls for compost and you slowly move it over until the compost is fully broken down um um but since we have two we just have we’re going to fill this all the way up before we move anything over um so basically I’m just going to dump all my kitchen scraps in this section everything in there all right whoops okay the kitchen scraps are in there I’m going to start adding Brown material you can use uh like dried up yard scraps you can use cardboard um any like sort of paper um but yeah that is that I’m going to keep adding some brown material um it should be at least like 50/50 but um more leaning towards like 60/40 brown material to green material which the green material would be the kitchen scraps um so I’m going to add some more Brown material to this and then I’m going to put some water in there and give it a good spin and I feel like I should say that it is better when the cardboard is like ripped up a little bit but I’m doing this one-handed so it is what it is woo I think that’s probably about good um everything’s nice and covered I threw some yard scraps in there too I’m going to go ahead and add some water and then spin it up and we will be done all right add some water should be about good and now for the best part the spin woo all right that’s that now you just let nature do its thing there it’s looking gross there we go that’s that and since I’m out here let’s peek in the greenhouse got some tomatoes on the left some eggplants some berries and a bunch of peppers few more transplants to go uh up in the other greenhouse and out in the garden but otherwise that’s about about that all right y’all that is that there’s our standing compost um and yeah that’s how we do it thanks for hanging out
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