A Beginner’s Guide to Composting for Your Garden

Gardening is a great way to take control of your health, since you can grow your own healthy food that you know is safe for your family. While it takes a lot of work to consistently keep up a garden, the result is worth it. One way you can keep up with your garden and help it flourish is by composting. For those who’ve never done it before, composting sounds intimidating, but it’s actually not hard to get started. Keep reading for a beginner’s guide to composting for your garden.

How Do You Start Composting?

Compost is really just a fancy word for decayed organic material, which people commonly use to fertilize plants. To get started, all you need is some kind of organic material and a box or designated pile.

While composting doesn’t require a lot of space, you’ll need to clear enough space for the pile or box of your choice. This area should relate to the size of your garden, as a small garden won’t require as much compost as a larger garden.

What Supplies Do You Need?

As we mentioned above, you can provide a small garden with a small compost pile or box. All you need is a cardboard box and biodegradable scraps. Fill the box with your scraps and then bury the box in your garden so all the fertilizing decay can happen right where you need it to.

If you have a bigger garden and want to compost on a larger scale, you’ll want to invest in two reusable compost boxes or select a safe area for a compost pile. Two boxes allow you to keep waste separate as it breaks down, but if you’d rather keep everything together, that’s okay too. A compost pile is just as effective, although you’ll need to turn it regularly to make sure air is getting into the pile and helping everything decompose. If you don’t want to turn the pile regularly, add a pipe or similar device that can aerate the underside of your compost pile.

You can add almost anything that’s biodegradable to these boxes or piles. If you have a farm or raise animals, you can compost manure. If you get a newspaper every morning, you can compost the paper when you’re done. Most people compost food scraps, but the options are extensive.

How Long Does It Take?

Compost takes time to break down and mature, which means you’ll have to wait months before you have usable compost. While a small cardboard box won’t take long to fill, it will take time to break down after you bury it. The breakdown will benefit your soil at every stage of the process, but it won’t be a quick process. Compost requires patience, just like every aspect of gardening.

Caring for a garden is hard work, and composting for your garden takes the same amount of dedication and patience. This beginner’s guide has hopefully prepared you to begin your composting journey.