The Compost Conversation

I’m sure you have come across the claim that you can’t or shouldn’t compost meat scraps and dairy products. Given how often it is repeated, it must be true … mustn’t it? Perhaps it is time to channel our inner ‘toddler’ and ask “why?”. If we can understand the reasons ‘not to compost meat and…

Have you been told that you can’t, or shouldn’t, compost a particular thing? Perhaps it is onion skins or citrus peel. Meat and dairy are on the exclusion list for lots of folk, or perhaps it’s waste oil or fats? Weed seeds, pest infested fruit and plants like couch or kikuyu grasses are usually sighted…

The bodies of all living things, from the largest trees to the smallest microorganisms are mostly made of carbon, organised in microscopic chains called ‘polymers’. These carbon polymers take different forms, and each form breaks down in our compost in a different way and at different times. Let’s take a look at three common carbon…

We have talked before about the importance of getting the moisture content of our compost piles right. Our favourite image for the ideal level is a wrung out, wet sponge, wet enough that, if you squeezed it hard you could just get out another drop, but not dripping water. This is about 55 per cent…

“Did you see the wind today, blow the autumn leaves away? From on high they fluttered down, some were red and some were brown”. The magic of autumn and the childhood fun of playing in leaf piles has not left me, but I now see another magical thing about the blanket of leaves falling on…

There is a bit of confusion out there between ‘straw’ and ‘hay’. You hear them used interchangeably but they are quite different products and play different roles in our compost piles. Let’s have a look at what makes each distinct. Hay is grass or other pasture plants that are cut when they are still green…

In this week’s Compost Conversation, the team from YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) bid farewell to their very first YIMBY composter. Melinda Jane took a leap of faith and joined YIMBY at the beginning of 2021. During this time, 2834 kgs of food scraps were processed in her backyard. She collected 919 buckets from…

The big chop It’s important to chop our compost ingredients fine enough so that they have the right consistency to break down perfectly in our compost piles, not too coarse, not too fine, think about every bit of nitrogen-rich food scrap being small enough to be in good contact with some carbon-rich ingredient. Let’s have…

For the past couple of weeks we have celebrated the impressive skills of the bacteria and fungi in our compost piles. We have looked at how they each work away at decomposing their specific, and quite different, dietary preferences, incorporating the nutrients they access into their microscopic bodies. So how do our plants get access…