Composting tips

Here are some easy and simple top tips to turn food scraps and lawn clippings into gardening gold.

Keep it simple. Bury your food scraps in a hole or a trench directly in the garden, preferably in and around foodproducing zones; e.g., vege gardens and underneath fruit trees. If you run out of space, you can dig into ornamental beds too.

Carbon. When building a compost pile, add carbon, carbon and more carbon. Most compost bin and compost pile failures are due to a lack of carbonrich ingredients, things such as straw, dried grass, shredded cardboard, leaves, prunings from the garden, wood chips, sawdust. It isn’t uncommon for people to chuck only their food scraps in a compost bin, which results in a smelly, sludgy mess. Adding about 50% carbon will make the compost cake break down a whole lot better and without the smell factor. Surprisingly, making a compost heap out of fresh grass clippings, old dried grass clippings and food scraps will work, because the dried grass clippings supply the carbon needed for a healthy compost heap. Luckily for us most gardens have other materials that can be added to the mix; the more ingredients the better.

Water. Dig into your compost heap and test the moisture levels: water is often lacking. Pop a cover on open piles so moisture will be recycled within the pile rather than evaporating away. Water the much neglected, windaffected sides as they dry out first, weekly in the height of summer.

Glorious free mulch. Use grass clippings as a mulch around ornamental beds and trees. Don’t push the mulch hard up to plants: you don’t want to damage them as the grass decays. Remember weeds grow for a few reasons. One of them is that soil doesn’t like to be naked, so cover up with clippings.

Yummy eggs. This isn’t for everyone, but everyone is allowed chickens. Create a feeding square: a minimum of one square metre, 10cm deep for two chickens. Fill with wood chips. Feed everything out of your kitchen into this pit. Anything that doesn’t get eaten gets scratched into the wood chips, along with some chicken poop. Once a year dig out the pit and either add it to a compost bin or put it directly on to some vege beds in the autumn, ready for spring planting.

Bucket list. For free fertiliser from your food scraps, go the bokashi bucket way. It’s a super way of turning food scraps into compost direct in your soil. Right up there in the ‘‘too easy to do’’ awards. Vege gardeners will be blown away by the results. Fivegoldstar material.

Try a worm farm or two. Great when used in combination with another composting system, which will spread the load when those creatues are doing their annual winter slowdown.

Don’t wage chemical warfare on your lawn. It leaves the lawn clippings useless to use at home and at the compost yard. Lawns aren’t meant to be perfect. Perfection is a story we’ve been sold. Enjoy the diversity of a chemicalfree lawn.