A BACKYARD COMPOSTING PRIMER
	OCTOBER 2003

by Jenny Parma

With burgeoning landfills in the background and population expansion always in front of us, the issue of waste conservation is beginning to come into the limelight. While the green and blue recycling bins play their part in reducing the trash output, one of the best solutions involves the old farmer’s method of composting. Composting is the process by which micro-organisms recycle organic material into soil amendments and fertilizers. Composting has been used for many millennia to reduce trash and recover valuable resources for stabilizing the environment and assisting in cultivation. By sparing a few minutes a week for the project, a family living in the suburbs or a single apartment renter living in the city can easily turn waste into rich soil amendment.

The Stink of It
What exactly happens to your garbage after the department of waste management retrieves it from your property? The huge mountains of garbage are first dumped into numerous landfills around the area — depending on the bin’s contents. City workers then sort materials from the green bins into 10-foot high by 6-foot wide piles, which they cover with black plastic tarps. After several months, the materials decompose into soil amendment, which the department sells to local nurseries and gardens around Contra Costa County. Organic materials that were put into brown bins are not divided into these piles but get buried beneath tons of trash and sludge from the sewage system, which prevent air and moisture — the two essential components of composting — from reaching the waste.

Amy Zaora, compost education coordinator for SLUG (San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners), addresses these issues. It’s important to be conscious of the landfill system as you try to decide what you want to throw away, because anything you throw away becomes permanent mass in some landfill. A 40-year-old hot dog pulled from a landfill still looks like a hot dog. One million Contra Costa County residents trash 390,601 tons of waste (of the 66 million tons of trash state-wide) into landfills annually. Forty-five percent of that number contains organic material — that could have been regenerated into fresh soil amendment for backyard and indoor plants.

Step 1: Choose a compost container. While composting can be done in open piles, a wooden or plastic bin – at least 3’ x 3’ in size – is more ideal for warding off rodents.	Step 2: Create ventilation for your compost pile by either building a container with screens or by lacing larger branches together at the base of a heap. Aerate a compost pile from the bottom up.

Aiding the Environment
Along with reducing the trash problem, composting improves the environment by saving moisture and water runoff, fuels plant and vegetation growth, and contributes to the carbon cycle. “Your soil is constantly being depleted of nutrients it needs to grow the plants that feed us and create our
shelter, clothing, and warmth,” Zaora says. “Since only a very tiny percentage of the earth can be cultivated, it’s very important to give back to the soil.

Composting does that.” The process of composting involves a recipe that combines carbon and nitrogen for micro-organisms, like fungi, bacteria, and insects, to munch on, while recycling the ingredients back into nutrient-rich soil to grow plants, vegetables, and foliage. Home owners, apartment renters, and anyone with a space called “home”require four ingredients to begin the composting process to brew the perfect recipe of carbon- and nitrogen-replete compost.

What to compost
Do compost:
– Greens Browns
– Kitchen scraps Hay
– Fresh lawn clippings Fallen leaves
– Young weeds Straw
– Tea bags Old lawn clippings
– Eggshells Woody pruning
– Coffee grounds Old manure
– Coffee filters Paper/newspaper
– Fresh manure Paper towels

Don’t compost:
– Meat
– Dairy products
– Grains, beans, or breads
– Dog, cat, or bird feces
– Diseased plant leaves

Composting Recipe
Composting involves feeding micro-organisms, so it’s important to create a compost pile that is made up of varying amounts of green and brown organic material, as well as moisture and air to attract and sustain its growth.

Greens
Greens supply micro-organisms with nitrogen, a rich protein source. These materials include vegetable and fruit trimmings, fresh lawn clippings, young weeds, tea bags, fresh manure, and coffee grounds and filters.

Browns
Micro-organisms require more browns, or carbon, in their diet than any other ingredient. Brown materials come from decaying products that create long chains of sugar molecules that give the organisms energy. Examples of browns include hay, straw, fallen leaves, old leaves and yard trimmings, paper, and used paper towels. Most backyard compost piles require a 2:1 ratio of browns to greens.

Moisture
Compost piles need an appropriate amount of moisture. Too much moisture kills the microbes, while too little moisture creates an anaerobic and smelly environment. Zaora suggests trying to find a middle ground when watering a compost pile. “The consistency of your compost pile should be like a blueberry muffin or a wrung-out sponge,” she says.

Air
There are two types of microbes: aerobic and anaerobic. Although both can help turn materials into compost, the oxygen-breathing ones burn a pile of trash into rich supplement much faster and without the putrefying stench of rotting garbage. It’s important to ventilate a compost pile by aerating it from the bottom up and by turning the pile at least once a week. Build It and They Will Come If a compost pile is built in an ideal environment that is full of the “tastiest” ingredients, microbes will thrive there, where they’ll turn and burn — turn your compost and burn it into soil fertilizer.

Step 3: Cut your browns and greens into 6-inch lengths.	Step 4: Begin building a compost pile by layering greens on top of browns, and topping the mound off with a final layer of browns. The consistency of a pile should be at least 2:1 browns to greens.

Find the right container
When building a compost pile, decide where you’ll contain it. The dizzying number of options — from the one-bin, two-bin, tumbling, and trench systems — can be confounding. Consider the amount of waste you produce when choosing a system. Large families that create a lot of waste may need a large bin to contain it, while a single person living in an apartment might choose an open pile or a worm bin.

Many hardware stores provide plastic and wood composting bins. It’s just as easy to build one yourself or simply begin composting in an open space. Container composting wards off unwanted rodents and flies and adds to the aesthetics of a backyard. When using the bin system to compost, make sure that the container is at least nine cubic feet (3' x 3').

Hot Pile Building
After choosing a system, take into consideration the two types of composting: active (hot) or passive (cold). Active piles are built all at once and convert garbage and debris into compost much quicker than passive piles, which are created over a period of time. However, hot piles require more attention than passive ones.

To build an active pile, be sure to create pockets of air at the bottom. Do this by such methods as lacing tree branches together at the base of the heap. Then, cut up all the other materials into 6-inch lengths, and layer the greens on top of browns, topping the pile off with a final layer of browns. Since there should be a much larger ratio of browns to greens, use greens sparingly. Optimize the conversion of trash to compost by diversifying the contents of the pile. For instance, add manure and kitchen scraps to a pile made up of too many green leaves. After you’ve formed the pile, touch it. If it feels dry, use a hose to water it until it feels spongy. Turn the pile every few days to circulate the air.

Step 5: Check the moisture level of your pile by touching and smelling it. Compost should feel like a wrung-out sponge and shouldn’t smell. If the pile’s dry, water it. If it smells, it’s over-watered.	Step 6: Turn the compost at least twice a week for active piles and at least once every two weeks for passive ones. Separate out decomposed soil amendment from a pile by placing a screen on top of a wheel barrel.

Active piles are hot because they attract microbes quickly. As they multiply, microbes begin eating leftover human scraps and rotting organics. As they eat, they perspire and shuffle around, which creates heat. By enticing more microbes to feast on the pile, the composter creates a hot environment that induces the speed of decomposition.

Larger piles create greater heat. The huge, 10' x 6' piles of organic waste at the landfills heat up much faster than your little 3' x 3' heap. However, by diversifying the pile and checking its moisture and aerobic levels often, a pile of trash can turn into compost in as little as three weeks. Lastly, turn the pile every other day, or so. The contents in the middle of the pile decompose quicker than those on the outside. To keep a balanced consistency, invert the materials from the inside to the outside.

Cold Pile Building
Cold, or passive, piles are created over time. Residents with less time on their hands or smaller families often build these types of piles. The general process for building cold piles matches hot pile building. The difference involves the ingredients, which are usually sparser.

To begin, use greens as the first layer. Build more layers by alternating browns and greens. The most important thing to remember is to top the pile off with a brown layer to repel rats, flies, and any other unpleasant guests who are attracted to rotting food remains. Then, follow the steps for building a hot pile. Keep the pile aerated and moist by turning and watering it every so often. After a few months, the trash will turn to sweet, brown goodness.

Step 7: Rub your hands over the contents until the amendment has been sifted out. Replace the leftover compost back into the pile.	Step 8: A compost pile that has turned into rich soil amendment will be free of branches and other distinguishable organic material. When it looks this good, it can be used in many capacities — as topsoil, fertilizer, or as a soil base.

Troubleshooting
Composting, according to Zaora, is an intuitive process. If you plan to start a compost heap, plan to “commune” with your pile at least once every few weeks. It takes a little while to get in synch with your scraps, so in the meantime, here are a few tips to help you when encountering problems:

– The temperature in Contra Costa County can get to 110° throughout the summer months. Retain moisture in these conditions by keeping a lid or a tarp over the pile.
– A stinky pile is too wet. Knock off watering it for a couple of days or weeks.
– Try taking the temperature of the pile with a composting thermometer. Turn the pile when it reaches 80-110 degrees.
– To attract micro-organisms during the beginning stages of building a pile, add extra greens.
– If part of the compost pile has decomposed, divide the soil amendment from the decomposing materials by placing a large screen or other makeshift sifter over a wheel barrel. Rub your hands back and forth over the contents until you’ve separated out the amendment from the other materials.
– If you are troubled by your compost becoming infested by ants, be careful about spraying poisons that might possibly contaminate the rich soil you are, after all, trying to create. Products like Grants Ant Stakes provide a non-intrusive solution. The ants will typically swarm over the stake overnight and will be almost gone by morning and will really be gone within a couple of days. These things supposedly don’t merely kill the ants, the bait is taken back to the nest and it kills the queens.

Worm Composting
Also called vermicomposting, this type of composting is ideal for single families with no backyard. The vermicomposting container is much smaller than the container for the other two methods and can even be kept indoors. The ingredients are the same as for backyard compost piles, with the addition of a handful of red worms (eisenia foetida and lumbricus rubellus).

Worm composting requires smaller plastic or wooden bins the size of a dresser drawer — between 8 to 12 inches deep. These containers also should be aerated by drilling about 10 small holes underneath the container. Place a tray beneath it to capture any excess drainage. Finally, lay a cover over the worm container.

Provide bedding for the pile by placing a few layers of newspaper or cardboard flat on the bottom of the container. Then, add about six inches of damp paper shredding, dried leaves, or paper towels to it. The contents of this layer should be moist — again, like a wrung-out sponge. Worms usually dwell under dampened leaves or decomposing compounds and moisture is especially important for prolonging their lives.

After creating bedding that comprises about three-quarters of the container, add kitchen scraps and one pound of red worms to the container. Mix the contents with your hands, and place the lid over it. Balance the container on a stand, and continue to add bedding mixture, food scraps, and water to the ingredients over time until the materials have decomposed. °

Jenny is a Contributing Editor for 110° - East County Living magazine. You can reach her at jenny@110mag.com