Gardening is one of the world’s oldest and most rewarding hobbies. A flower garden can help to beautify your home and neighborhood, while vegetable gardens provide you with lots of fresh food to ease your grocery bills. One of the best ways to promote growth in your garden is with compost, and composting is something almost anyone can do – free!
Compost is simply organic matter that has rotted, consisting of things you have normally around the house. To produce compost, all you have to do is pile a variety of organic waste together in one place. From that point, nature takes care of the rest by providing microbes that break down this matter and make it a useful fertilizer and soil enhancer.
Almost anything, which is not manmade, can be composted. Compost materials can be loosely grouped in two categories. The first is plant waste, and this takes the longest to decompose. Plant waste can be anything from grass clippings to weeds you have pulled, and can even include the stems and roots of flowers and vegetables you have picked. The second category is food waste, which can include eggshells, lettuce, coffee grounds, melon rinds, apple cores. In fact, just about anything you can think of can be composted, even dog hair.
Once you have gathered your compost materials together all you have to do is pile them up and wait for them to rot. There is a variety of different commercial composting containers available, but if you have enough room in your yard, you can simply pile the material on the ground or build a bin to hold it. Composting can take anywhere from six months to two years. You can speed up the composting process by turning it regularly with a pitchfork, by watering it periodically, or by adding a commercially available rot-inducer.