YIMBY composters
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Reflections of a composter
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…
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The Compost Conversation – with Joel Meadows
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…
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The Compost Conversation
Do you feel the itch to learn how and why to make great compost, or solve your compost problems, or put compost theory into action?
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The Compost Conversation – Hot composting
If you want to start hot composting – getting your compost to heat up to at least 55o Celsius for at least three days.
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The Compost Conversation – The dirt on compost forks
When it comes to the work of composting; building, turning, moving and distributing, forks are the tool of choice. There are three broad fork categories; garden, pitch and manure/mulch, each doing its own job in a particular way. Let’s have a little dig around and see what we find. Most gardeners will have a common…
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The Compost Conversation: The compost screw – What a corker
Many of our gardening tools have a history going back centuries, if not millennia. The compost screw (or corkscrew) is a newcomer.
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The Compost Conversation – Nutrient cycling: everyone’s doing it!
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…
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The Compost Conversation – Fungi, the quiet party guest
By Mikaela Beckley Neither a plant nor an animal, fungi are unique, often misunderstood, and essential to making a good compost. Often the first thing that comes to mind when we think of fungi is mushrooms, but in fact these are just fungi’s fruiting bodies. The actual fungi live under the ground growing in a…
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The Compost Conversation – an homage to the bacteria
Over the next few weeks we thought it would be fun to take a deep dive into the microscopic world of our compost piles and meet some of our composting microbes. As composters we could see ourselves as microbe farmers, as like any farmer worth their salt we aim to provide our microbes with a…
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The Compost Conversation: Composting while taking a break
By Mikaela Beckley With the coming of spring, the warmer weather and perhaps some respite from weekend sporting commitments, many of us are heading off for a holiday. Yay! What does this mean for our compost, and our kitchen scraps? Before leaving, preferably at the height of packing madness, remember to take a moment to…
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The Compost Conversation – with Joel Meadows
Getting the carbon/nitrogen balance right Most of us know we need a blend of carbon-rich and nitrogen-rich ingredients to make a good compost mix. The perfect compost ratio recommended by most compost sources is approx 30-parts carbon to one-part nitrogen. But what is a carbon nitrogen ratio? All living things have both carbon and nitrogen…
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The Compost Conversation – with Mikaela Beckley
Moisture monitoring: Give your compost a squeeze This week we’ll look at how to tell if your compost is wet enough, but first, let’s just remind ourselves why the correct moisture content is so important in our compost. The beneficial microbes that do the hard work in our piles need a thin layer of moisture…