Hi! I am Tim MacWelch of Earth Connection School of Wilderness Survival and Ancient Skills near Fredericksburg, Virginia. This is our Organic Gardening video, and in this clip, we're going to talk about making compost.
This is the wonderful black gold that you can make out of all of the leftover junk that you didn't know what to do with. Every time you rake the yard, every time you have a bag full of grass clippings, all your kitchen vegetable peelings and all kinds of other plant material can be composed it to yield a nice, rich, dark, supercharged plant food.
Now, compost contains a lot of things. Many different plants store different nutrients and keep them in their dead leaves or the dead grass blades or lots of different dead plant parts. These nutrients are released into the compost and they are available and ready for your vegetables to eat.
So, all we have to do to make compost, very simply is pile up all of our refuse and make sort a garbage dump as it were out of all these household leavens and yard waste and all that good stuff, and time will do all the work.
We don't have to get out here, and flip this and water it and mess with it, but that will hasten the process greatly. So, if we wanted to, we could turn our compost piles, scoop them all up and flip them over and make a new compost pile right next to the old one. Agitating all the material and stirring it up will give us a faster result.
We also need to maintain a certain moisture level. This should feel as damp as a wrung-out sponge. So, if you can imagine how damp that would be, just slightly moist but all year round, all day and all night, just slightly damp. And the more carbon material; and carbon material is basically all of your dead leaves, the dried grass clippings, coffee grounds, old mulch, all that type of stuff, the more carbon material you have, the better the compost will be.
Nitrogen material is green stuff, like green grass clippings or any other type of fresh vegetable or plant waste. So, this stuff; you'll only need a little bit, you need maybe one-twentieth of the volume of green stuff as you do the carbon stuff. Some people will say even one-fortieth the volume of green stuff to all the dead carbon stuff.
So, whatever ratio you end up with, it's all fine, it all works. This all will rot into dirt, it will just take longer for some of the mixtures than others. Now, you may have seen on the market a compost tumbler and this is a fine little device, but you may not like the price tag. And maybe you can't have a pile in your backyard. Maybe neighbors won't like it. Maybe some kind of health code will be violated. So, we can make a compost tumbler out of an old trashcan.
I have simply drilled holes all throughout the trashcan, the top, the sides and the bottom, and I can place all my compost scraps, all my banana peels, an old nasty head of cabbage, mulch, grass, leaves, long clippings, all that stuff. Place it in there, spray it with a garden hose, and then I put the lid on it.
Now, I've selected a garbage can that has a locking lid, and you'll see why that's important in just a second. Take my bungee cord, strap this thing shut and now I have a $20 compost tumbler, instead of a $200 compost tumbler. All I have to do is kick this thing around the yard, to tumble the contents and agitate them, and if I just do this once a day, I won't kill the grass underneath because this thing is moving around, and the contents are being stirred and agitated. The kids can do it, it's a lot of fun and the price is right.
Now, no vermin can get in here, the cats and dogs, and raccoons and possums and all the creatures in the neighborhood, can't get in here and throw your compost everywhere, because it's sealed inside the garbage can. But we have all the air holes, we'll spray some moisture in here, and we'll have our plant material in here, and that's what we need for compost.
So, many times I've made compost in this garbage can container, and it will sit here for a season or two seasons or even three seasons and then it's done. And then I can dump it in the garden and revitalize all my plants.
So, that's two quick ways to make compost; in a pile or in a makeshift compost tumbler. Next, we are going to talk about how to make an inexpensive, miniature greenhouse.
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