Frugal Living Through Compost Piles: A Guide to Composting

Have you ever thought about composting? Maybe, you’ve never even heard of composting? Composting is a great way of disposing food and yard waste to create nutrient rich soil.

According to the EPA.gov, composting is becoming more and more popular with homeowners. Compost piles can offer many benefits to your yard.

The Benefits of Frugal Living Through Compost Piles:

• Reduce or eliminate the need for chemical fertilizers.
• Promote higher yields of agricultural crops.
• Facilitate reforestation, wetlands restoration, and habitat revitalization efforts by amending contaminated, compacted, and marginal soils.
• Remove solids, oil, grease, and heavy metals from stormwater runoff.
• Capture and destroy 99.6 percent of industrial volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) in contaminated air.
• Reduces the need for water, fertilizers, and pesticides.
• Extends municipal landfill life by diverting organic materials from landfills.

If you have no idea how to begin building your own compost area, it’s fairly simple. Just make sure you follow these simple steps. You have to understand the compost process first and make sure to include browns, greens and water to your compost.

“Food scraps and yard waste currently make up 20 to 30 percent of what we throw away. These items should be composted instead. Composting keeps these materials out of landfills where they take up space and release methane, a potent greenhouse gas,” according to the EPA.gov.

All composting requires three basic ingredients, according to the EPA:

• Browns – Materials such as dead leaves, branches, and twigs.
• Greens – Materials like grass clippings, vegetable waste, fruit scraps, and coffee grounds.
• Water – Having the right amount of water, greens, and browns is important for compost development.

Your backyard compost pile needs to have an equal amount of brown waste to green waste. Make sure you alternate the layers of organic material. The EPA explains that, ” The brown materials provide carbon for your compost, the green materials provide nitrogen, and the water provides moisture to help break down the organic matter.”

To begin, find a shady spot that is fairly dry and near your hose (or other water source). Next, add the browns, greens and water to keep the pile moist. Next up, mix the compost with a pitchfork every few days.

Now you may be wondering what kind of materials to compost. It’s simple. Food waste like banana peels, coffee grinds, egg shells, fruits and vegetables, tea bags and nut shells are perfect for compost piles. Don’t compost any sort of dairy products. Yard waste like plant trimmings, cardboard, paper and grass clippings are a great place to start. Just keep the browns, greens and water equal and you will have successful, nutrient rich material for your existing plants and garden.