Yes in My Backyard

When looking back at many early recipes for compost making, I often see soil recommended as an important compost ingredient. Yet, many modern composting resources don’t even mention soil as an ingredient at all, or some even recommend against using it. Despite this, some of my most respected composting sources do recommend the use of…

Between the chopping board and the compost pile there sits another piece of composting ‘equipment’ that often gets overlooked, but it’s a critical link in our composting chain. I grew up calling the thing in the kitchen we scrapped food scraps into the ‘compost bin’. But I have to admit it gets confusing when we…

It used to be pretty standard advice to add sprinklings of garden lime to our compost as we built them, it’s how I was taught to compost and a rule I followed for years without questioning, but is adding lime essential for a healthy compost? Garden lime is simply powdered limestone, a natural material that…

I first met Lisa Williams when YIMBY were out looking for new composters in her street in north-west Castlemaine. We needed to replace two of the original YIMBY composters who were ‘retiring’ and we already had neighbours in the street leaving out buckets of food scraps on bin night, we just needed to find a…

Is it really possible to keep our compost hot in these cold winter months?If you’ve been following the Compost Conversation, you will undoubtedly know that the reason compost gets hot has little to do with the outside temperature, or position in the sun, and almost everything to do with how well we are feeding and…

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…