When I go out door-knocking with our YIMBY* composters, looking for households to offer us weekly buckets of food scraps, I am amazed by how many people in our area say they are already composting.
As someone who is fascinated with compost, one part of me wants to jump for joy, the other part wants to take a look at their compost!
It’s easy to tell whose composting is going well, they are keen to talk about it and know what a boost it is to their gardens. Others are a little more…coy about how their compost is going.
If this sounds like you, don’t despair, this is what the Compost Conversation is for.
We are going to lift the lid on that stinky bin and have a good look at what is going on in our compost piles. We’ll delve into what changes are needed to make our compost piles come to life.
The good news is, there is almost no compost pile that can’t be fixed.
Compost Conversation will delve into all the nitty gritty, like; carbon/nitrogen ratios – and how to assess them, moisture content – and how to get it right, aeration and density of ingredients, turning your compost – when and how, and we’ll be making space for readers’ questions and tips.
Composting is like farming, we are dealing with living (and dying) processes, and we are not totally in control, just working with nature to get an outcome that works well for us both.
If I was to offer only one tip for improving your compost, it is to pay attention. Too often our approach to compost is to ‘chuck and run’. We’ll never get great compost using that approach.
We hope the Compost Conversation gets us all paying lots more attention to our compost piles and lifts the caliber of composting in the region.
Not everyone has to be a composter, there are alternatives (and we’ll look into those in coming weeks too), but if we are going to make compost in our yards, let’s make sure we are doing it well.
Next week we’ll have a look at a common compost problem, smell (I’m talking the bad stuff) and what we can do to help our pile along.
Joel Meadows works with *Yes In My Back Yard, (YIMBY), a community-scale composting initiative in Castlemaine and surrounds. Send questions or comments to hello@yimbycompost.com
