Show #19/2406
Erosion Control

What is Compost?

What is compost? Compost is just a mixture of organic materials. They look at a pile of weeds, grass clippings and twigs, etc. This will turn into compost in about 6 months. What's behind them is a commercial pile that has been delivered from the city and there are about 4,000 of those city composting facilities across the U.S. If you make compost correctly it generates heat which kills weed seeds. Eric asks about the balance between green and brown material. Rod tells us that typically a homeowner wants to devote about 1/3 of their pile to green material, and that includes grass clippings, some homeowners will also use food waste; then 2/3 brown stuff, wood chips, leaves and twigs, things that are older and brown make a nice bulking agent. It's the nitrogen in the green material that helps accelerate the composting process. As mentioned, it can get quite hot, it's important to kill the weed seeds, and that's all part of the normal physiological process of decomposition as it's being converted from leafy material into very rich soil. It's a very normal process, all the organisms that are doing the work and creating heat are what one finds in natural soils, they are always on the ground or in the plant materials we collect. This is a very practical thing to do at home.