Garden Composting Dos and Don'ts

Hi, I'm Ali Reynolds with Ali's Organics. Today, I'm going to tell you some do's and don'ts with doing your, with your compost. Some of the does are: use organic matter, grass clippings, leaves, pine needles, things from your kitchen. You want to do things like your greens, you want to use egg shells. Things that you don't want to use from the kitchen are: meats, oils, you don't want to use any dairy products. Those things attract animals and they also introduce bad bacteria into your compost. One of the other things that you don't want to do to your compost is add too much water. If you add too much water, it causes things to compact, they aren't being able to get the air, the oxygen to the center of the pile, it becomes real stinky and slimy, and so if you do that, then you need to be adding some peat moss to help with that. You do want to make it, though, to where it's a nice rung out sponge consistency so that it has enough moisture in there that it can break down, but not too much. Animal manures, like cow, horse, chicken, goat, rabbits are really good, all of that's really good to add to your compost also. If you can mix some other things in with it, some grass clippings and some leaves, that really helps break it down too, but you don't want to be using things like animal feces of a cat or a dog. You don't want to be using human, you don't want to be using diapers in there or plastics, or anything like that into your compost. These introduce bad bacteria and we don't want that in our compost. You also don't want to be using a synthetic fertilizer. Synthetic fertilizers, when you put them in there, they basically kill of the good organisms that are in your soil. We want the good organisms in there. We want things that are living and moving and we don't want to kill off the worms. So don't use anything that's inorganic to your compost. You can use, you can use activators that are for composts. Those are great, but you can also make your own just by simply using Blood meals and Bone meals, and even some of your old compost that you've had. That's an activator also, so add some of that to a scoop full to each layer, does a great job for your compost. So there's some do's and don'ts for ya for composting.