If you're curious about compost, but you don't know either what it is or
just how to get started in a practical way at home, this video is for you. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening
where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb. And you know
when I started gardening, I didn't understand either what
compost was or how to make it. And so that's what we're going
to demystify in today's video. We're going to talk first of all
what it is and why it's so important. And second of all, we're going to go over six different
methods so that no matter who you are, where you live, what
your circumstances are, there's at least something that you can
do to start using some of those food scraps, that green waste, that
brown waste on your property, and turning it into super rich compost
for your garden. So without further ado, cultivate that Like button
for Epic compost heaps. And
let's get into the video. By the way, if you live in an apartment,
I have not forgotten about you. At the end of the video, I'm going to go over three different
cool countertop compost bins that you can use to make better use
of your food scraps. Quick primer on compost in
about 30 seconds before we
get into our six methods. Number one, what does it
actually do for us? Well, it improves the nutrients in our soil
that our soil life can then further break down and make bioavailable
to our plants. Number two, it improves the water retention.
When you add organic matter, your soil can actually hold more water. It's actually one of the best
ways to improve clay soil. So there's a whole lot of benefits and
really it's just organic matter that's being broken down.
Bacteria, fungi, insects, all sorts of things are breaking it down
into smaller and smaller parts so that eventually it can actually be taken
up by your plants to create some epic harvests. Okay, now let's get into method
number one. Well, method number one, no surprise is the tried
and true hot composting. Now what you're doing with hot composting
is you are making sure that heat does not escape the system cause this
is just a sped up version of normal decomposition. Now what you see
here, it's called a Biostack. It's about a three by
three by three foot system. I actually don't think
this is available anymore, which is a shame because it's a really
cool good system and it's got these covers. But the thing that I particularly like
about it is it deconstructs in thirds, which means that you can just
use the compost as you wish. You can kind of make yourself at home
and just use exactly what you need. But what the benefit of hot
composting is is number one, you can do it in large
volumes. And so again, at minimum you need a cubic yard to
get that biological activity going. But a lot of people, including my friend Charles Dowding
who does this at an insane scale, and in fact the compost he generates on
his property is all of the fertility he adds to his garden. He has
a three or five bin system. Those are huge bins. You can actually check my tour out with
him and it's fascinating to see how he does it. But the benefit is
faster, the benefit is more volume, but the downsides are that
there's quite a bit to manage. You need to get it up to a least 110
degrees. In organic certifications, I believe you have to get it routinely
up to about 160 degrees Fahrenheit, which means you have
to turn it quite often. You have to manage the different
amounts of carbon and nitrogen, which is about a 25 or 30 to
one ratio of carbon to nitrogen. You have to make sure that
it's adequately moist, there's enough air and so there
can be a lot to manage here. Which is why if you're lazy, you
may want to opt for the next method. If you are a lazy gardener, and I
confess I sometimes am this way, then the second method is
going to be perfect for you. It is passive or cold composting. Effectively just imagine that compost
pile you saw in tip number one, that you just stop
turning and stop managing. That's exactly what we're talking about. Now I have a little garden bin here
that I keep all of my, you know, greens and browns that I'm pruning
off. So I have this bouganvillia here, or if you're my Filipino grandma
you would call it a bougainBillea. And I don't want this right here,
so we're going to prune that off. Now this could be chopped into really
small pieces and it could be mixed into the middle of my hot compost bin and
it would break down really quickly. Or as I will do, and do quite often, I just chop it up a little bit further
and I'll leave it in this bin until I want to transfer it somewhere
else. And you just pile it up, pile it up and let nature do the work. What happens there is often
you'll get these pincher bugs, you'll get earthworms. A lot of
different things will come in. Now what are the downsides to this?
Number one, it's a lot slower. You're not taking advantage of all the
inherent benefits of hot composting, so you are losing that. Number two, if
you throw food scraps and stuff in here, it's not protected and so you're going
to get probably some more rodent and pest pressure. And really that's it. The benefits are that it is just extremely
easy. You just set it and forget it. You're basically just mimicking that
forest floor or that natural decomposition process. So if you are
a little bit lazier, this can be the perfect method for you. The third method is actually a method
that I don't have on my property right now, although I used to compost this way, and that would be using a compost tumbler. So put on your imagination cap and just
pretend like this is a compost tumbler. I'm going to put some up
on the screen as well, but basically these were invented to
solve two of the annoying problems of hot composting. And that would be managing that aeration
and mixing the components so that you always have fresh stuff in the middle
so that most of that heat and that biological activity can
break down the freshest, most undecomposed stuff. And so what you'll do is typically
you either have a one or a two chamber compost tumbler and what
you'll do is you'll fill it up. It still has to have that bulk amount
of material. You still need that, that space and that volume to be filled
so that that biological activity can perpetuate itself. But
then what you'll do is, let's say I filled this whole tumbler
up and typically they're on, you know, little stands of some kind. And what you'll do is you just
turn it every couple days. So you can manage the mixing and
the aeration a lot better. Now, there are some significant
advantages to that. The advantage that's most stand out
is that you just make compost faster. You know, a lot of these
tumbler companies say, oh, you're going to make compost
in two weeks, three weeks. I find that that's still a
little aggressive. I would
say a month, two months, and that's still faster than
hot composting, especially
these larger volumes. Now, why do I not own one and why am I using
a cloche as an example compost tumbler instead of one? Well, I used to own one. I used to own the Yimby (Yes in
My Backyard) compost tumbler, I believe it was called. And what
I personally found is number one, it still was kind of annoying
to manage. Number two, you get, if you ever have any rain, you're going to get leakage out because
there needs to be holes in a tumbler in order for it to actually work, right?
You can't just completely seal it off. I had some really annoying issues with
getting tons and tons of of black soldier fly larva aka maggots in there,
which isn't necessarily the worst, but at high volumes it can be bad. And I honestly just found like it was a
little more annoying to manage than my hot/cold compost pile
out in the front yard. Now there are some significant
benefits if you're in smaller spaces. If you're on a patio, if you really have pest problems
in a hot or cold compost bin, then lifting it up off the ground and
tumbling it and turning it over faster can be a really good idea. So
I don't want to knock it, it's just not personally for me, but
it can be a fantastic option for you. Method number four, which is my
favorite method is vermicomposting, also known as worm composting. Now the bag that you see here is
probably unlike many of the bags that you typically see. I actually did a video on how to build
a stackable worm tote for about 20 or 30 bucks that I highly recommend if
you prefer the more stacker method. This is what's known as a
continuous flow-through system, so it's a completely
sealed single chamber, which I really prefer both for
ease of use, for the smell. It really just doesn't
really look like a worm bin. You don't get insects flying in
and stuff like that. So I really, really prefer a continuous
flow-through and specifically this bag, the Urban Worm Bag. But really
worm composting is so fantastic, first of all, just
intellectually interesting. It's very fun to see how
these worms interact. But what you're doing here is
you're adding some bedding, so that's kind of their
base layer. Consider that
coconut coir, shredded paper, things like that. The next thing you're
doing is you're taking your food scraps, you're chopping them up nice and fine. The smaller the better because there's
more surface area for them to work on, and you're layering. So you
do a couple inches of bedding, couple inches of of food scraps, et
cetera. And then you add in some worms. In this case I added about two pounds
of worms to start and that's the only worms I've ever added and
it's been about 18 months. And they just self-regulate.
If there's not enough food, they won't reproduce as much. If
there's an overabundance of food, they'll reproduce like crazy and
they'll make quick work of it. And so it's a fantastic system. And what happens is you basically are
just putting stuff in the top and the worms are making their
way through. So let's say, let's say this thing is completely
full. It's completely full, I've got bedding and food scrap layers
on the top 50% and let's say the worm castings are on the bottom.
That's their excrement, which is basically our fertilizer. Well,
they don't really like to live in that. And so these worms, the red wigglers, they like to climb upwards and so
they're going to be in this upper 50%. Now when I come down and
pull this drawstring down
here and squeeze out some of that worm castings, there's not going
to be a whole lot of worms in there, which can be an issue with
some of the stacker systems. So I can just pull out once every
couple of weeks a nice amount of worm castings, which are roughly a 1-1-1 NPK, and just add them straight into my garden. And I'm adding a ton of microbial
life, some great micronutrients, some great trace minerals, and it's just a fantastic way to
make really fast compost at home. Method number five is the most exciting. If you don't have enough space and you
only have enough space for maybe a five gallon bucket on top of that, if you want to compost things that you
shouldn't compost like dairy products, fats, oils, bones, meat products. If you have that and you
want to make use of it, then the Bokashi composting
method is the one for you. Now it takes a hard left turn from all
the methods we've talked about because it's anaerobic, which
means without oxygen. And what that means is we have a
completely sealed five gallon bucket. Now I have an entire video on exactly
how I both built this bucket and the results. I went straight from like a two to three
week process from food scraps all the way to buried inground and the results. So I highly recommend you check
that out. But in a quick nutshell, what Bokashi is is you're using an
inoculated brand type of product. Basically it's lactobacillus and a couple
other different strains of bacteria, and you layer the brand. Let's say you
put some brand at the bottom, scraps, brand scraps, brand scraps, and then you put a cover on
top and you let it just be. What's happening there is it's fermenting. It's actually sort of pre-digesting
this and then when you're ready, which is usually about two weeks or
so, you throw that out into the garden, bury it and it just
vanishes. It just disappears. It's fascinating how quickly
it happens. On top of that, you can also throw it into your hot
compost bin, your passive compost bin, and it breaks down even faster. So there's a lot of different
benefits to Bokashi. Let's go ahead and look inside, cause I haven't opened this in a while
and I'm a little scared at what I might find. Okay. The moment of truth
is here. Let's crack it open. Prepare my nose. So this was the
plate that I use to seal it off. So it's got a little bit of growth
on it. Not a big deal though. Now down here you can see there's quite
a bit of white mold growth on it and you might think that's bad.
It's actually not that bad. That's actually kind of
what you're supposed to see. Now I can take all this material right
here and it's looking a little, you know, it looks okay actually, and, and bury this and it's gonna break
down extremely quickly and become bioavailable to my plants. So let me just put this back to rest
and let's move on to our final method. Our sixth method, which is the
pinnacle of laziness or efficiency, depending on how you look at it, is just taking food scraps and burying
them directly in the garden. Now, I really can't say a whole lot more about
this that my friend Mark over at Self Sufficient Me hasn't already said in an
absolutely fascinating video that just went absolutely viral. So I highly recommend you check out
Mark's video to see what happens when you bury fish, when you bury tomatoes, when you bury foods scraps directly in
the garden and stand the test of time. But they will break down and you will
see good fertility added to your garden. Now some of the downsides might be if
you're burying things like fish heads or food scraps and you have digging pests, then they're probably going to dig it
up and they will dig your garden up as a result. And for that reason, most of my composting
happens in my passive or hot
compost bin depending on how well I'm managing it or my worm bin
because they're sealed and I can protect from any sort of rummaging pests. But if you want to bury you
certainly can. So apartment people, I did not forget about you. I've been an apartment person
and this is how I've solved it. So this one is called the Chef'n EcoCrock. It's just kind of a cute
little countertop compost bin. And you might be thinking, okay, well if I'm in an apartment I
can't actually really compost. Well if you don't want to use one
of the methods we've talked about, this is a great way to just collect food
scraps and you can either drop them off at a local compost recycler. So you kind of trade food
scraps and you get compost back, which is a really good way to do
it. You're outsourcing your compost, but you're giving food scraps in return. So this one's really nice
cause it's heavy duty. This is like a porcelain type
material. Cute little top. But then the thing that seals
the deal for me is boom, you've got a removable pail that you
can just take out and it's got a little smell capture filter there. Now there's
a couple other ones that I kind of like, but obviously the one I have
is the one I like the most. There's the Polder which
is about one gallon size, has a bit of an industrial look. And then there's the Epica which
is probably the most popular one, at least on Amazon, and it's got about I think a
1.3 gallon stainless steel look. Basically the same as this but just
looks a little bit less cool I think. So if you're in an apartment, this can be a great way to
collect and repurpose food scraps. Whatever method you use to compost I
think it's important that you at least do try one of them. Even if it is just
grabbing that countertop compost bin, trading it out for some food scraps
and really practicing making use of the outputs of your home. Your kitchen, right,
your coffee grounds, your eggshells, your chopped up ends of
vegetables and repurposing it. And seeing what it can turn into.
Cause remember, you know, for example, this bean plant, how much we
use of it. We use the beans. We don't really use the rest of this.
And so we should do something with that. And we should find ways to repurpose
and make the most out of it. So I hope this was helpful. If it
was, tell a friend, drop a comment, throw a Like, throw a subscribe.
And until next time guys, good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
