Steve on Warpcast

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Composting 101 (aka some rules of thumbs I loosely remember) ## Making The waste you add to your compost is categorized as one of these 1. green: grass clipping, tea leaves, banana peels, kitchen scraps, etc 2. brown: dry leaves from fall, cardboard, egg shells, paper bags, etc Aim for 3:1, or rather triple the brown for every green. Shredding helps speed up the process. Avoid meat, dairy, grease, weeds, and chemically treated plants. ## Keeping There's several ways to go about containing the compost, but fundamentally each way needs three key elements: water, air, and heat. All three are crucial to the decomposition process, though as with all things it's a matter of consistency and moderation. Don't over or under do it. Watering could be once a week with an amount proportional to your pile (feel it out). Air is tumbling it (if in a rotating container) or pitchfork if in a "lazy" pile. Heat comes from max sun exposure; ideally targeting somewhere around 80-160°F internal temperature. (1/3)

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Steve pfp

## Keeping (cont) Major consideration isn't smell but critters! In my experience it never smells bad or rotten, but moist and earthy. If you decide to lazy compost (leave it out in a pile outside) just be sure to add fencing so you don't have unwelcome outdoor friends munching on your scraps. There are dedicated rotating tumbler bins, or if you're tight for space like I was when I was in my apartment during the covid lockdown, stackable milk crates and bags worked great. Even an old cardboard box could work if you had a way to capture any leakage from watering. There's lots of ways to go about composting. In general I'd just start small and feel it out! ## Using It'll be ready when it's dark and soft, or "black gold" as they say, with no visible trace of the initial materials. Just dump it on any existing plant or tree as if it were fertilizer! (2/3)

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## Other notes I haven't tried these two methods yet but plan to this season: Cardboard soaking: leave overnight in water, add to compost pile. This greatly decreases the time to break apart the fibers without having to manually shred the cardboard. And in today's deliver to home purchasing habits this could add a *lot* of brown material with very little effort. Just be sure to remove packing tape, labels, and staples from cardboard boxes. Weed tea: seep weeds from yard in water and leave out for 1-2 weeks, ideally in sun. The reason why clipped weeds generally shouldn't be composted is because they're stubbornly hardy and may reproduce in the compost. But supposedly this extracts all the nitrogen and nutrients from the weed into a water that can just be directly added to plants as a fertilizer. Happy composting! (3/3)

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