Composting

COMPOSTING AT OUR COMMUNITY GARDEN

🌱 What Is Compost?

Compost is a nutrient-rich, soil-like material made by decomposing organic waste through a natural process involving bacteria, fungi, worms, and other decomposers.

♻️ Why Should Community Gardeners Compost?

1. 1. Care for the Earth

Composting keeps our garden waste out of landfills. Organic waste makes up a large portion of what we throw away. 

In fact, in the United States, food and yard waste combined make up roughly 31% of the material in landfills, producing methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. By reducing methane emissions and sequestering carbon in healthy soil, composting helps fight global warming.

1. 2. Care for Your Garden

Compost improves the health of your garden soil by adding nutrients and improving soil structure and water retention. It creates air channels in clay soil, and it forms places for nutrients and water to be released in sandy soils. And it acts as a natural pesticide.

1. 3. Care for Our Pocketbook

Compost reduces water consumption and the need for chemical fertilizers. And it can lower garbage collection costs. By making our own compost, we can also reduce the amount of compost we purchase.

🧺 How Can Gardeners Go About Composting?

We have a great set up to produce nice compost.

We’ve got four compost bins hard at work behind the shed, and we’ve placed orange buckets for plant waste around the garden to make it easy for you to cut and carry cuttings to the first bin.

All you have to do is put your garden waste into the orange bucket and then into the first bin and NOT in a trash bag.

You can put in plant materials from your garden that have reached maturity and need to be pulled. E.g., yellowed beet leaves, bolted lettuce, an overgrown zucchini, a rotten tomato.

Smaller and softer plant waste (leaves, greens) can go right in.

If you have larger plants, cut them into two-inch pieces with the community garden shears.
 

We are not allowed to contribute food waste because of our location on school property.

And do not put in weeds, thick sticks or tomato or sunflower stalks (they do not decompose easily), diseased or pesticide-sprayed plants, or animal waste. They’re not good for compost.

You’ll see signs by each bin about the necessary contents and process of composting.

Almost by magic, we can get some wonderful compost just by combining green and brown material, water, air, and sunshine heat! As amazing as what comes up in our gardens!

It helps to water the piles to keep them moist and to turn them every couple of weeks to add air. Through volunteer help, we look forward to developing a more regular process of watering and turning the compost that is cooking in bins 2 and 3.