How to make Compost - The Simplest Easy Method To Compost Piles!

hey this is joe with grow a building today i'm going to tell you how to make compost a complete tutorial so you've probably heard that compost is a gardener's best friend it's the absolute best thing you can use to fertilize flowers trees shrubs vegetables i even like top dressing on my lawn in the winter time just to add some organic matter it's just all around good stuff the broken down organic matter is full of nutrients that are slow released the plants taken when they need them you can break up hard compacted clay soil with compost uh you can it'll make it drain better you can also add it to sandy soil to make it hold water better there's really like this is like the universal best awesome thing you could possibly have to add to any kind of plant they all love it now i am a member of a lot of gardening groups and internet forums and a lot of times when someone gets on there and they're a newbie and they ask how do i start composting they often get bombarded with a lot of technical information and it's like some people just like to make stuff so much more complicated than it needs to be so i compost in the most simple way possible and i've been doing it for four or five years i make a lot of compost every year and i'm going to show you i'm going to tell you all the basics of composting what to use what not to use how much all that and then i'm going to actually build a pile from scratch and we can see it break down now i'm not trying to set any speed records of composting faster than anyone else but i do it fairly passively and it works great so let's get into it okay so to make compost you need four basic ingredients for the bacteria to get going you need some green material that's like green and leafy that's your nitrogen source you need something that's kind of papery like cardboard or newspaper that's your brown material you need to have some water it needs to be moist but not soggy wet and then you also need a little bit of air in there and with those four ingredients you'll get the good bacteria to break down your comp and your stuff and make a compost very quickly um now what green materials do you need okay so kitchen scraps of pretty much any kind if it's coming from a plant is okay you know apple corers banana peels they're all great grass clippings are about the best green material there is for getting it hot quickly and another one that's good is coffee grounds which is quite regularly used but any kind of green leafy yard waste will work fine as well you know it's just keep it plant-based and you'll be okay you can also use egg and shrimp shells but not the egg or shrimp anyways let's jump to brown material so this is like regular paper newspaper cardboard regular corrupted cardboard that doesn't have paint on it or tape or stickers or anything and sawdust i love sawdust as compost because of all the surface area it already has you know it's kind of like pre-shredded and then dried leaves um you know in the fall those are great brown material to use as well now the what you should never compost or not compost is anything that's glossy from the brown stuff so uh like this cardboard here is glossy reflecting light that stuff's not going to break down very well and i don't know what kind of chemicals could or could not be in that also the high glossy newspaper inserts you get in the mail i stay away from those um and then anything that's not plant-based uh like meats and cheeses um you know don't do it it's uh i mean it'll break down but it's gonna take a long time and it's probably gonna attract some raccoons or other animals that maybe you don't want tearing up your pile in the process um okay so uh me i compost on the ground and i usually have three piles going all right so my first pile is the one that i add to and i continually add to it every couple of days every time i fill up my little silver bucket in the kitchen it's coming out here right onto there next i have my pile that is basically completely done and this stuff is what i can take from and use i can store some in buckets if i want you know it's all good and then i have my third pile which is almost there so there's still organic matter in this but it's just not quite fully done so i'll leave this one to the worms to finish off i'll turn it once a week and that's about it now i'm a big proponent of keeping your compost on the ground because the worms will find it so even if it's not if it's not hot composting at the top at the moment the worms will come in here and help break down um remaining organic matter so that's just kind of a big benefit of keeping it on the ground if your situation allows for it i'm a big fan of it okay so we are going to start a brand new compost pile and this was all filmed on may 3rd 2020 and let's get started on it um so i've got all my materials and i saved them up for this video i've got around two and a half gallons of kitchen scraps which you know normally i just take them out as i accumulate them i don't normally store them but i also had a bunch of grass clippings i saved from mowing the lawn the day before and again these are like the best thing in the world for uh nitrogen source for my brown materials i'm gonna be using um this is like that packing paper from amazon so i'll tear this up into strips that's excellent stuff and then i have a whole bunch of uh you know brown stuff that i just store in my basement every time i get a package from amazon or christmas time i just i spend an hour just tearing stuff up into little strips and save it it really comes in handy which we'll talk about further later but in addition to that um and this is something if you know a woodworker or you are one yourself your sawdust is an outstanding source of uh brown material i love it because it's such a it's already like so shredded up it's sawdust it's complete surface area it's excellent so to build a pile what do you do well you probably heard this before but i'm going to repeat it anyways you start with layers you layer your browns then your greens then your browns then your greens and you keep doing it this is just the easiest way to kind of get that going and so i'm using all my materials that i showed you here today normally i just use whatever's available but anyways you know you just constantly mix them up and you'll notice that uh my sawdust and the cardboard are pretty dry so i'm gonna have to add water here in a bit but uh as i mix though you'll also notice that i'm stirring it up as i go i don't leave it as layers you know this stuff wasn't meant to be separated it's meant to be mixed so that's how i do it um so mix them thoroughly as you're doing this um it's uh you know getting it all together is going to be better that way you know a bunch of brown material segregated from the green material isn't going to do anything so and while you're doing this as you're building your pile water it um and it's mainly to water the brown materials you know the sawdust is dry the cardboard's dry it needs to get about as wet as a rung out sponge and before i forget what i tried to target for my proportions is 50 green 50 brown that usually seems to be the best target but don't get hung up on that like if you're a little too far one way or the other you can always supplement it with just adding more green later or just turning it more frequently if you have too much green in fact you really should um just because as the green material breaks down um and it kind of compresses itself it'll eventually get to a place where there's no air and if there's no air then the bad bacteria will take over and we'll see a special case of that with the grass clippings here in a couple of minutes but you don't want that to happen because that's the anaerobic bacteria taking over it breaks stuff down it just takes forever and it's sludgy and mucky and it's slow so anyways and you've probably also noticed me grabbing a handful of my compost from you know my old pile and throwing it in there and that's just kind of to jump start with the good bacteria if you don't have a compost pile to take from use a handful of soil from your yard or garden it'll do just the same the the bacteria is already there and just putting it into your newly formed compost pile is just going to jump start everything a little quicker but that's it though i mean it's just layer mix water layer mix water rinse and repeat but anyways as you can see i'm making quite a big pile this one's going to have no problem heating up but i make as big a pile as i have material green material available so if i don't have much green material i don't sweat it i just i add it anyways even if it's smaller again i'm on the ground the worms are going to give me an assist with forming worm castings so okay so i'm on i'm in a unique situation this is what it looks like halfway across my yard you can kind of see the compost piles back there by the forest from my house you really can't make it out so well um so i'm in a unique position and i understand that most people may not be and they may want to make like a pallet fence or something to kind of hide the compost or get a tumbler but i understand that but i just wanted to show that okay this is may 5th the compost pile is two days old and i came out here one morning to add another bucket of kitchen scraps and she's smoking and it's hot and i like it that's what we want to see that's all that nitrogen breaking down from the bacteria the bacteria kind of basically they basically pass gas and uh that's what heats up everything as far as i understand they give off heat and uh air now anyways uh i came i ran back in and grabbed my uh infrared thermometer i don't have one of those big uh thermometers for temperature probes so i have to uh use this but anyways the ground surrounding the pile is 60 fahrenheit we'll check the temperature inside and uh yeah it's a good sign when you can see it steaming as soon as you turn it you know and it's hot to touch in the middle there i mean you'll figure that out real quick but okay so after being exposed to the air for a couple minutes it's still 118 fahrenheit so that's pretty good i know they target 150 but i don't have a way to measure that so and i actually there it went above 130 so it's probably close to 150 inside the pile just once you expose the air that changes um and before i forget um i all the information i'm telling you here is available at an article on our website which i will link to in the description so if you want to get a quick reference after watching this video and like maybe you're outstanding by your pile you can pull up that article instead of sitting through a whole video trying to find where i talk about something specific it's just faster um but anyways yeah so i just keep mixing it and with grass you really really really need to mix it daily because it breaks down so quickly that the grass is going to want to mat up and layer up on you and when that happens if it goes into sludge form where it's the anaerobic bacteria it's i mean you can get get it back but it's not very fun to do so uh so okay now we're five days old it is still smoking still or steaming i should say so again a good sign there's not as much grass visible and it's still very very hot though in the middle so there it's been exposed to the air for about 5-10 seconds and let's see what it says 128 fahrenheit so it's pretty hot in there yet so that's excellent that's what i want to see um and again you have to keep turning this stuff though and you don't just flip it once or twice i mean i i really mix it up i'm not showing you all the footage because i mean it gets boring just watching someone turn a pile but uh anyways i and again i keep adding more and more green stuff to my pile as i go um but uh keep turning it keep mixing it because as the grass starts to layer up and it'll kind of form like little balls that'll you can almost peel them apart like pages in a book which i kind of found some here this kind of shows it um i mean i didn't let it get bad so but you can see how i'm just separating it almost like pages in a book this will turn into sludge if i'm not careful what you're about to see right here is footage from a year ago a pile that i neglected and have way too much green material way too much grass and it's basically like looks like mud but it's really just stinky grass that's broken down and anaerobic bacteria has taken over um you know to fix that you got to dry it out and just mix up a bunch of other stuff and keep it going get let the good bacteria take over okay so now we're 12 days old and again it's still pretty hot in there that's good and it's breaking down everything's going nice uh you know this this process really happens fast like it's you don't notice it day after day but when you put all this footage together it gets pretty interesting to look at but again you just have to keep doing it now i did notice here that i couldn't see any of my brown material anymore so i didn't really notice much sawdust i didn't notice much of the cardboard of paper so i went to my stash of brown material which i keep excess amounts of and i came out here and just dumped it all on there again just to mix it up and uh you know try to prevent the bad bacteria from taking over um and again mix it thoroughly you know you know this is may 15 so in two weeks all my brown material is gone most my grass is unrecognizable my kitchen scraps are some you can recognize some of you can't uh if we come back to june third so now we are one month old this is the pile but wait it's not a pile what is it well you're probably asking like well don't animals come attack your pile well apparently they did the night before so i must have dumped some something sweet out here that something wanted to get at and this is what a destroyed pile looks like so it's spread out about six foot diameter it's really not a big deal where i lit you know for me because you can break this stuff up really easily i mean i just came out to put in some more kitchen scraps and uh you know there we go i'm pretty much done with my pile again it's uh it's fully formed so it's not a big deal for me to clean it up okay we're at june 12th and i'm getting really close to calling this pile done enough you know to where i'm not going to add to it anymore you really can't see much grass in here at all you can't hardly recognize as much of anything i mean there is stuff stuff present because i continually add stuff to the pile but by and large man this is uh this is looking pretty good so i'm quite pleased and again we'll come back here again about six days later and take a look again and this is june 18th and i am essentially done with this there's nothing else to really do except wait wait for the worms to kind of get in there and finish the job for me um so that's always a good feeling it you know this stuff is broken down this is broken down enough to use although you probably want to separate the stuff that was visibly green or sticks or whatnot but uh and i i apologize i didn't have footage of 10 days later i just had a couple of pictures but this is the pile and it's like done so it's just shy of two months and again this is not working too hard at making compost but i've made excellent looking compost and i'm done so all right what's some tips and lessons learned that i've acquired over my years of doing this the first one is keep it simple and don't be hung up on you know cn ratios just try to go 50 50 by volume and uh take it from there you know you're going to learn by doing this more than anything else you know you can watch a million youtube videos read a thousand articles on this and you're not going to learn nearly as much as just going out and trying it on your own but you know mother nature breaks down organic matter all every day of the year and she doesn't care what your c to n ratio is it just it matters how much time it's gonna take um the next tip is just you know as far as what materials if it came from a plant it's okay to use um in general um you know if it's grass clippings if it's from a plant you know if it's from an animal don't use it unless we're talking about shrimp shells or eggshells then it's okay and then i do have to talk a little bit more about worms so i mean i love the worms in my compost but i have a somewhat i won't say it's that unique but i have the asian jumping worms in my area and i have them here and they're voracious little eaters so they make my stuff you know whatever i have left over once the compost cools off they turn it into uh worm castings very quickly probably quicker than uh if you didn't have them so it's just something i have to live with but anyways uh you know and again if you guys have any questions on this stuff please just ask in the comments though i mean i'm i like trying to answer them i'll do my best on this but uh you know the big thing though is if you are going to use grass clippings though because a lot of you probably will just make sure you turn it every day for the first week or two you know until there's really no chance of it matting up and you just want to avoid this black sludge stuff you know that's the cold compost the dreaded cold compost that nobody wants to deal with so in summary on this topic what do we got well um we're going to try to use 50 50 green to brown material by volume and again you always want to keep an excess amount of raw material on the hand that way if it goes too much to the green you can always add brown it's easy to store brown because it's just cardboard turn the stuff frequently keep an eye on the moisture if it doesn't feel like a rung out sponge then you want to add some and if you can keep the pile on the ground you should do so i mean you might get a little benefit from the worms like i do uh that's a good thing and uh you know it helps speed everything along but anyways if you guys enjoyed this video give me a thumbs up and subscribe this will be part of a large playlist on soil building soil testing vegetable gardening that i'll make in the coming months as i release more videos but i hope you enjoyed it and thanks very much you

Channel: Growit Buildit

Views: 290,895

Rating: 4.9510264 out of 5

Keywords: compost, how to compost, how to compost food scraps, how to compost yard waste, how to hot compost, how to compost at home easy, composting for beginners, how to compost without a bin, how to make compost, how to compost beginner, how to compost backyard, how to compost cardboard, how to compost easy, simple compost, hot compost, compost eggshells, compost coffee grounds, how to turn compost, how to mix compost, how long does it take compost to compost, compost for begginers

Id: nxTzuasQLFo

Length: 18min 10sec (1090 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 14 2020