Here are a few crucial steps to ensure success with your composting.
Ensure Your Compost is Clean
Inspect your compost bin regularly. Make sure unwanted items like cooked food and citrus have not made their way in, especially if more than one person is on scrap duties.
Speed Up the Composting Process
With a small spade or garden trowel, lift the top of the compost surface and cover newly added material; working in the fresh food scraps will speed the oxidation process.
Prepare Greenery for Compost
Long fibrous stalks and small branches of greenery must be chopped down. It can be done outside with a good pair of secateurs or pre-chopped in the kitchen.
Enhance Compost with Grass Clippings
Grass clippings are an excellent way to introduce nitrogen, but also help to improve the compost structure by reducing lumping and making it easier for the worms to dig in.
Harvesting Compost
A compost bin or a worm farm often has a removable base to harvest the compost. The material at the base looks like rich black soil without food scraps.
Use Composted Material as Fertiliser
Composted material can be spread around the vegetable plants as slow fertiliser and ground cover or worked into the soil to prepare the garden bed before planting.
Efficient Water Usage
Plastic trays and grids can be washed out of any residue or blockages. Wash these items on your newly made garden bed so you make the most of your water usage.
Collecting Compost Drainage
If the moisture level inside your composting device is exactly right, the excess moisture will drain into a collection tray. That coffee-looking water is ‘black gold’.
Utilise Liquid Organic Fertiliser
Black gold is a liquid organic fertiliser, and it is the byproduct of good composting. Pour it into light-proof bottles and use it around the garden. Dilute it 1:1 with water.
Check the Health of Your Worm Farm
If you are composting in a worm farm, it will probably pay to check on its health once a month. A handful of compost should reveal several worms of different sizes.
