Yes in My Backyard

In last-week’s Compost Conversation we looked at what makes some batches of compost go over temperature (over 68o Celsius), and why that is a problem. This week we’ll look at the remedies. The suggestions made in this article could be detrimental to a compost not suffering overheat, so please read this week’s and last week’s…

A mistake we humans often make is to think that if something is good, more of it will be better. We can make this mistake with the temperature of hot compost. Hot compost has so many benefits, but only up to a certain temperature. If our composts go past this ‘sweet spot’ temperature, we start…

I’m sure we have heard that putting food scraps in our general waste bin, then burying them in a landfill site produces greenhouse emissions and that home composting is a “climate action we can take now”. But isn’t it just the same organic material put in a different place? How can this make such a…

Welcome back to the Compost Conversation for 2025, and a happy new year to all our readers. Here at YIMBY we are still bursting with ideas for compost articles, so will keep the conversation going into 2025. Do let us know if there is a compost-related article you’d like to read, or burning compost questions…

Good quality, home-made compost is teaming with life, and because of this we need to care for it, to the very end! When we have spent months making a great batch of compost, getting it just right, the last thing we want to do is kill it.At the heart of it, compost is about creating…

There is no agreed definition of what compost actually is or isn’t, and a huge array of commercial products sold as ‘compost’ look more like ‘mulch’ to me. Some people use the terms ‘mulch’ and ‘compost’ interchangeably, but that could get very confusing if I say, “it’s a good idea to mulch your compost after…

The answer to the question of whether adding seaweed to our compost will enhance it, is a simple yes. Seaweed is a rich source of nutrients like nitrogen, potassium and phosphate, which are essential for plant growth. It also contains vitamins, amino acids and trace elements like manganese, zinc, copper and boron, which are often…

I was chatting to new YIMBY composter Laura Jade about things that make it through our compost piles virtually unscathed. Laura started composting with her partner Lesley back in June as part of the West End Compost Cluster, a rapidly growing YIMBY area, in West Castlemaine. Laura and Lesley have already composted over 700kg of…

In last week’s conversation we looked at synthetic auxins, a group of persistent herbicides that can have devastating impacts on broad-leafed plants like beans and peas, tomatoes and eggplants and pumpkins and cucumbers, causing stunting, curled leaf tips and in some cases death. Synthetic auxins are coming into our food systems in commercial composts, garden…

‘Synthetic auxins’ are a group of herbicides that have been quietly killing off backyard and market gardens in our region for some time now. ‘Aminopyralid’ is a type of synthetic auxin, but is commonly used as a name for the whole class of these herbicides. I have seen dozens of gardens devastated by synthetic auxins,…

YIMBY composters teamed up with ‘Dig It’ MainFM program and Growing Abundance and took to the streets in the Castlemaine Show Parade last week to make some noise! These three down-to-earth institutions in Mount Alexander Shire highlight the fun and serious business of composting and gardening. By all accounts, much fun was had in the…

Occasionally we get a distressed call at YIMBY informing us someone has fruit fly in their compost…Common names can be a bit misleading, and it turns out quite a few flying insects get the name ‘fruit fly’. Although Queensland ‘fruit fly’ (Bactrocera tryoni) is a serious agricultural pest, the fly that people are seeing in…