- A staggering 28% or more of food waste just goes to a landfill,
completely wasted, absolute tragedy, and sitting right here
is one of the best ways to repurpose that and throw
it back in the garden. But there are a ton of
myths and misconceptions about composting, which we're
gonna bust in today's video. Myth number one, is it compost? Smells bad. Honestly, that smells
fresh, that smells sweet. Why? Because it's a well-managed
epic pile of compost. A poorly-managed pile will smell bad. That's your signal that
you're doing something wrong. There's about four
things you can do wrong. Number one is you've
built the pile incorrectly so it's very compacted and there's anaerobic pockets in the pile. Anaerobic means lack of oxygen, compost, this is an aerobic
hot composting process. So anaerobic, you'll get these bacteria that smell honestly like doo-doo, they do not smell good whatsoever so you'll need to rebuild the
pile to troubleshoot that. You can also have too many greens. That's probably the more common one. Sometimes too many browns can smell, too wet of a pile. And then finally, you can
add fats, oils, meats. Some of these things that
are often recommended to not put in compost. They can rot out and have a
sort of sulfuric foul smell. There's actually a method of composting that works really well
for those fats and meats called Bokashi Composting
which is an anaerobic process and we've done a full video on. Misconception number two
is that a compost pile has all sorts of bugs in it, all sorts of rats and
and rodents and vermin. And yeah, that can be true. I'll address the bugs first. In a proper hot composting
pile, you have at least a three cubic feet area or one cubic yard. We'll put the meters up on the screen. In the center, you're gonna have most
of that heat generation. At the edges, it starts
to go a little colder, and that's where some of
those larger decomposers, like your worms and your
pill bugs and your arthropods start to come in so that's
actually quite normal to have bugs around the perimeter and at the bottom of a compost bin. Now, rats and vermin, that's a little bit of a different story. There's different ways
that you can prevent that. One would be using a compost tumbler or a fully screened-in situation and then you'll get things
like maggots in compost and all sorts of different
sort of creepy crawlies that they might be a
little unsightly for you. The best thing I can recommend for that is to cover with straw or
leaves to try to keep them out, maybe add a little bit more rounds. But all this to say it's
really not as big a deal as I think you might think. And half of those, the bugs
are actually kind of good. The biggest myth that
keeps the most beginners from really getting into composting and having a great time with it is that they think it's too complicated. They think they need some sort
of fancy recipe or process to really get perfect compost. For example, you need a
30:1 carbon - nitrogen ratio so you need to calculate
the ratio of your greens and your browns, then put
'em all into a spreadsheet and figure out the perfect blend, and then raise it to 160
Fahrenheit three times to make sure it's broken down. You could do that. You could, and certainly I
have some friends that love getting that deep with it. I actually really enjoy
that part of the process. But to get started, you could
take something as simple as 50% greens, 50% browns,
and throw 'em in a pile and forget about it, and that
still counts as composting. The fourth myth is that it
just simply takes too long to get perfect compost as the output, and it's just not worth it. And while that can certainly be true, if you want to get really wild with it I'll give you the recipe. I'll give you the thing to follow. It's called the Berkeley Method. It's one that works really well for an actively-managed hot compost pile. So what you'll want to do, take greens, take browns, roughly by
volume, put them in at 50/50 and then turn that pile, make
sure it's nice and aerated and then you'll want to heat it up to 130 to 150 degrees
Fahrenheit for four days. Then, after that, take a fork like this, come on in, and turn it
every two days for 14 days. And then in about 18 days you'll have really
well-broken down compost. But like I said, that's
actively-managed hot compost. If you're a home gardener who doesn't want to get that deep into it, you can do something like
I'm doing right here. I've gotta compost thermometer in here. This was at about 150 to 160 Fahrenheit for maybe a week or so, and
now it's slowly cooled off to, I don't know, about 80. And what I'll do if I
want to restart this pile and break it down a bit
further is move it on down this row here and just sort
of rebuild the pile that way, and by the time it gets to the end it'll be pretty damn close
to a finished compost. But I'm not stressing because this part of the
gardening process for me I like to take it a little bit easier. One of the more pervasive
myths is that hot composting will completely and totally
kill off any weed seeds that you find in the garden
and toss into the pile. Take this guy right here. The idea is that if I throw this in, just let it be, these are gonna be dead and I can then freely spread that compost without fear of spreading the weed seeds. It's true, but you have
to heat that pile up to 140 Fahrenheit for over 36 hours and make sure all those
seeds are in that hot zone. And as we've learned,
that just might not be your composting journey or
your particular process. One powerful thing that
you can do is get to them before the seed heads form in the season, cut 'em all outta the garden, maybe a nice rainy day where
the soil's nice and loose. Pop 'em in a pile, let them
completely die and dry out and then work them into the pile. And actually, weeds are weirdly
a gardener's best friends. We have six different
tips on turning these into garden gold on this video right here. As always, if you want
awesome gardening products that have been tested by us that we love, they're on our shop,
shop.epicgardening.com and our seed company Botanical Interests. Until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.
