Simple Compost Ingredients List -Browns and Greens

[Deb_NY]

Should I throw worms that I find in the compost also?

[rainbowgardener]

Won't hurt, but if your compost pile is on the ground, the worms will come to it, so you could just add the ones you find to flower/ veggie beds.

Hydrangea is the only plant I know of that changes flower color depending on the pH (acidity) of the soil. So if you added (a LOT) of pine needles in the soil around it and made it more acid, it would bloom more blue. If it is blue flowering already, that may be just fine. If you make the soil around it more basic (by liming) the flowers will be pink...

[Scarecrow]

I did a search on the forum but didn't find an answer.

Do or can you put whole vegetables in your compost pile which may include seeds and all?

I just put a whole cantaloupe that a friend gave me which went way too ripe. I took the seeds out first though.


I really like this forum and have been reading it daily!

Thanks

[applestar]

If you wash and dry the seeds, you can put them in the birdfeeder.

[planter]

Feeding the birds with lope seeds is a great idea but you Applestar are one dedicated individual to take the time.
I guess I must be a bit on the lazy side cause I just chuck them on the heap along with pretty much anything else that will rot or at least provide needed loft.

Well back to digging Big-Ole-Holes in the woodlands for trees I don't even have yet..

I guess us gardeners all have problems but I think my BIGGEST is that I don't stop quite often enough to admire my own efforts although my wife disagrees and says I'm always sitting on a five gallon bucket staring..

[rainbowgardener]

I put whole fruits and vegetables that are past their expiration date into the compost pile, seeds and all, making sure just to open then up first so that they will break down easier. (Not very often, I work hard to make sure all the produce is used, but every once in awhile something gets past me.) The worst thing that will happen if you have melon or pepper seeds in your compost pile is that when you use your compost, you will get volunteer melons or peppers, and what is so bad about that?

[planter]

Right on Rainbow!! My best winter squash years are the ones that plants sneak out of the side of a pile and I never know if they will be pumpkins, butternut, acorns or some unidentifiable garden mutent.

There are a few thing that go in my cold heaps that never die!!! Roadside daylilys, hosta, as well as a few nasty weeds just keep on going!! It's the forget-me-nots that are the worst offender!! Ones mans junk.......

[applestar]

Heh, heh. I'm just cheap.

I only buy premium birdseed because I don't want the junk seeds and I don't want the junk birds But why pay the premium prices when you have even better bird food. I would offer them organic food to alleviate their toxic load if I could, and I can, if I grow them myself.

The compost pile doesn't need the seeds and only squirrels and chipmunks (and probably mice) benefit if I put the seeds in the pile -- anyway, they can eat the other parts of the melon, etc. if they can get their little paws on them. This way, I can offer the seeds to the birds that I'd like to have visit my garden, and that's less seeds I have to buy from the store. I grow sunflowers for the same reason.

This morning, I watched a goldfinch hanging upside-down from a multi-small-flowered sunflower that had gone to seed, pecking away. Heh, I'm lazy too. Now, I don't even have to harvest, dry, store, and fill the birdfeeder.

[Scarecrow]

... The worst thing that will happen if you have melon or pepper seeds in your compost pile is that when you use your compost, you will get volunteer melons or peppers, and what is so bad about that?

Well not a bad idea on volunteers popping up if I had the space to transplant them since I have a small space for a garden. So far I've been shying away putting anything with seeds in my compost bin for this reason.
Thanks RG!

If you wash and dry the seeds, you can put them in the birdfeeder.

We're slightly off topic but I don't have a bird feeder but I though about geting one to help with the insects. I don't want to get rid of the bees that are visiting my little garden.

Scarecrow

[rainbowgardener]

Birds won't bother the bees, but they are really beneficial for your garden (as well as beautiful/ entertaining to watch).

[tomf]

Reading about what are a green and a brown I think I have a shortage of browns. Mostly I am using food waste and lawn clippings but it seems to be composting any ways. Later I intend to get some manure from some of my neighbors as many of them have horses and have said I could take all I wanted. I would like to make a bin large enough to use my 5’ tractor bucket to turn it and bring it to my garden. If I read this right it looks like the straw in the bedding and the horse poop are browns. Is this right?
I also use lawn clippings as mulch especially in the meadows far from my house and near my garden.

[cynthia_h]

Manure of all kinds, being nitrogen-rich, is a compost green, regardless of its visual color.

You'll want twigs, sawdust, straw, shredded (news)paper, etc., for browns (carbon-rich ingredients) to balance the greens. If the pile goes smelly/slimy/nasty, you'll know it's time for browns to the rescue. OTOH, if the pile just sits there doing nothing, you'll know it's time for more water *or* more greens.

Cynthia

[tomf]

That makes it real easy to understand Cynthia, thanks.

[ACW]

Corn cobs , not a major part of my youth with the family ,Mother never grew or bought it ,
So whats the best way to compost the cobs after we have eaten the rest , we mostly bake the cobs husk on in the oven .

[rainbowgardener]

I just throw the corn cobs on the pile with everything else. They don't break down real fast that way. Three months later, when I turn the pile over, they are still there, but considerably softened up. At that point I break them up a little bit by hand (often there are earthworms in the middle). The next time I turn the pile over, they are gone.

If you didn't want them hanging around that long, if you have a way to grind/ chip them up, they would break down a lot faster.

[nakanj]

I'm confused! I have never had a compost pile but would like to start one. Do I separate the greens and browns? Can I use a container or does it need to be on the ground?

[rainbowgardener]

Don't separate the greens and browns. The whole point of having both is to mix them together so that both carbon and nitrogen are included in your compost.

One of our members wrote a nice piece on how to get started composting:

https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=161319&highlight=compost+101#161319

Read that and this thread and browse around in the Compost Forum and you will have all the info you need.

You can use a container if it has PLENTY of air holes. Composting is an aerobic process and oxygen needs to be able to get to your materials.
If you are composting in a container, it helps to throw a handful of garden dirt in every once in awhile, introduce some soil biology. Maybe find a few earthworms and add them too. Because of the earthworms and soil organisms, I prefer composting on the ground, but whatever works best for you so that you will compost is what you should do.

[dim]

I recently read that the printed coloured paper is suitable for the combost depending on which kind of paper and ink and the technique of printing in general. I suppose that the releaving of toxic substances during degradation is what we want to avoid. In other case the printed coloured paper is ok for the compost.
... and if this is right, how can we recognize the toxic and the non toxic for the compost appropriate paper ?

thank you !

[nakanj]

thanks, I'm gonna start mine this spring

[nes]

dim - from my understanding: newspaper okay; gloss ads/magazines: not okay.

[nakanj]

if I don't have enough compost, what can I buy to supplement it?

[rainbowgardener]

if I don't have enough compost, what can I buy to supplement it?

I'm not going to exactly address your question, because I don't have personal experience with any of the commercial soil additives out there. You can find some discussions on the topic by typing bagged compost into the Search the Forum keyword box.

But one thing you can do to make your compost go farther is to turn some of it into compost tea. There's a whole HUGE thread in this section about ACT (sometimes known as AACT - activated, aerated compost tea). I haven't been motivated yet to do the whole pump, airstone, time the brew, sterilize all the equipment routine. So I've been making a compost infusion. Put a small shovelful of compost into a bucket of water (rain water or water that has sat open over night to outgas the chlorine) add some molasses and keep stirring it for awhile. Not as good as real ACT for having tons of microbial life, I'm sure, but the molasses and stirring should at least get some activity started, which hopefully will continue in the soil.

It does make a rich, lovely, good smelling, latte colored mixture which goes a lot farther in the garden than the original shovel of compost.

[rot]

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If you're just top dressing your compost you can use coffee grounds as compost helper.

You can either mix it in or do it in layers. If you do it in layers, leave the compost on top to mitigate the crusting of the coffee grounds.

I've put coffee grounds directly into the ground before when putting in something potted but I don't know if that's recommended. I just know the worms really dig the coffee grounds.

to sense
..

[The Helpful Gardener]

Get paper from folks; they are saving for recycling anyway...

Garden waste from neighbors...

Produce from supermarkets; shouldn't just go in the dumpster...

Sawdust from sawmills (NO pressure treated!)

Coffee grounds ARE great...

[nakanj]

Wow!Thanks for all the tips. I will try all of them. so glad I joined this site!

[tedly]

I keep a scrap bucket (small stainless trash can with a lid) in the kitchen. If it's edible and not an animal product or dairy it goes in there, then gets dumped in the compost pile. I try to use paper bags at the grocery store so they can go in there too. Newspapers. Dryer lint. Junkmail and old papers get run through the shredder then dumped in. Pizza boxes and other cardboard gets ripped up and thrown in. Fall leaves. Old phone books get their covers ripped off and pages ripped apart. Used coffee grounds still in the filter. Tea bags. Egg shells. Weeds. Ashes from the fire pit. Sawdust from projects I'm working on. Paper plates and paper towels if they aren't too nasty. If I'm running low on browns I'll either grab some dead leaves from a wooded area nearby or hit offices in town for their shredded paper (I usually try to hit places where I know someone).

[rainbowgardener]

Agree with all of the above (except my kitchen scrap bucket is plastic that kitty litter came in, with tight fitting lid) and I put (small amounts) of dairy products in also. And water the veggies were steamed in, if I'm not making soup stock out of it. And lots of fall leaves (I collect the bags of them people set out at the curb). Once the yard waste bag the leaves were in is empty, it goes in too. I work in an office where I can bring home all the bags of shredded paper I want. (The shredded paper also works great as fire starter for the fire pit.) I also brought a little trash can with lid to work, so I can bring home the coffee grounds and filters from all the coffee people make there. For any one that has access to it, one thing that really heats the compost pile up is duckweed! We have a big pond at the bottom of the hill, that gets covered in the stuff (or maybe it is actually watermeal). I take a net and scoop a bucketful of it out now and then. Very fine textured and high nitrogen.

Along with weeds, all the trimmings and pulled stuff, alive or dead, from the garden and the house plants.

Dryer lint only works if not too much of what you dry is synthetic. I don't use my dryer very much any more, anyway, mostly hang clothes. And one time I decided to empty the vacuum cleaner bag into the compost pile (thinking about dirt and dust in there). Our carpets are synthetic and I had red carpet fibers floating around the yard for years after that! Indestructible!

[rot]

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I've used wood ash before. I use it only a little bit at a time because its fine texture can smother a layer if you're heavy handed.

The garden guy on the radio the other day was declaring somebody had killed their compost pile by adding a bunch of of wood ash and has since mentioned wood ash as bad for the compost bin a couple or more times. The garden guy's point is the pH swing that comes from wood ash.

Is anybody else seeing bad things after applying wood ash in the compost pile or in the ground?

I'm kind of wondering.

Thanks in advance
..

[tedly]

With the sawdust and ash, I just throw some in every once in awhile. I'm still a novice but I had read how too much of either can be harmful. No adverse effects so far.

[Heron's Nest Farm]

. Who has a pile of feathers to add to a compost on a regular basis?! (rhetorical!) I know someone who has chickens could but it just seemed a very strange thing to list.

LOL! Our cat keeps killing birds and the feathers are EVERYWHERE in teh mud room. NOW I know what to do with them!

[Rabbidave2012]

How much ashes/charcoal from my burn pit can I add? Obviously it is only tree branches and th like tat I burn no synthetic materials or painted material etc.

I have heard that ashes in large quantities will change the soil to an alkaline on the ph scale so you want to be careful there. maybe by mixing your coffee grounds (slightly acidic) in with them will help to counter balance the changes.

[The Helpful Gardener]

True Rebbe, true...

HG

[Tonythegardener]

A friend of mine on the community garden site said that I could have some of his compost heap. This heap is about 6 feet tall and 15 feet long. It is a monster of a compost heap. It is obviously a compost heap that was neglected and forlorn because , as soon as I started to dig into it, I found various buried plastic trays, tubs, pots and other miscellaneous gardening paraphernalia. It is reportedly about thirteen years old at the bottom.

The top and sides were covered in a mat of grass and weed rhizomes and they had to be removed before the friable, clean compost could be reached. Now I can tell you that this compost has never been turned, layered, or otherwise mollycoddled, yet it was as good, if not better than, carefully crafted compost.

Theory would have it that this compost, which continually grows through addition of extra material, should be a putrefying mess of foul smelling goo. Compaction and water logging should have produced an anaerobic compost heap. It is not foul smelling, slimy or putrefying.
Why?
It would be very difficult to produce compost that does not contain at least some pockets of anaerobic respiration; it would also be difficult to make compost that does not have any oxygen at all. The one noticeable characteristic of this 6 foot mega compost heap is the number and variety of small animals that inhabit all parts of it. I can testify to this because I have been up close and seriously eye ball to eye ball with them on a large cliff face of compost.

It is unnecessary to list all the creatures that make compost their habitat; however worms could be found throughout the heap. The role of these invertebrates in keeping a supply of oxygen throughout the compost and allowing aerobic decomposition to take place cannot be overstated. They cannot be ignored when considering composting and in heaps that are more mounds of rotting material rather than pristine compost bins.

[The Helpful Gardener]

You have answered your own question, TTG. Worms have been doing your work for you; aerating, turning, opening the soil up, and you are right; that cannot be overstated. Compost works on aeration. Putrefecation can happen any old way, but compost needs air, and worms are a fine way to get there...

HG

[Vorguen]

I have been pretty worried about composting newspaper and cardboard with any ink on it, I know I keep hearing its mostly soy based and not harmful, but a little bit adds up over time no?

and the absolute most natural way to treat your garden would give you back the greatest results I believe..

Maybe I can use newspaper / paper / cardboard with ink / etc in a separate compost pile thats not for the garden...

Heh, heh. I'm just cheap.

I only buy premium birdseed because I don't want the junk seeds and I don't want the junk birds But why pay the premium prices when you have even better bird food. I would offer them organic food to alleviate their toxic load if I could, and I can, if I grow them myself.

The compost pile doesn't need the seeds and only squirrels and chipmunks (and probably mice) benefit if I put the seeds in the pile -- anyway, they can eat the other parts of the melon, etc. if they can get their little paws on them. This way, I can offer the seeds to the birds that I'd like to have visit my garden, and that's less seeds I have to buy from the store. I grow sunflowers for the same reason.

This morning, I watched a goldfinch hanging upside-down from a multi-small-flowered sunflower that had gone to seed, pecking away. Heh, I'm lazy too. Now, I don't even have to harvest, dry, store, and fill the birdfeeder.

How are birds visiting your garden beneficial to your garden? Do they eat the insects that are harmful to it?

I thought some birds would eat your fruits and some of your other plants, but I'm not very experienced in any of this

[Kisal]

How are birds visiting your garden beneficial to your garden? Do they eat the insects that are harmful to it?

Yes, all birds -- except for raptors -- feed their nestlings with insects, even the species that are seed-eaters.

I thought some birds would eat your fruits and some of your other plants, but I'm not very experienced in any of this

Birds can do some damage to a garden. They routinely take a good portion of my blueberries and cherries, and sometimes they'll damage some of the apples. There seem to always be enough left for me, though, so I don't let it bother me. I've never had a problem with birds bothering my tomatoes, or any other crops. I provide the birds and animals with fresh water, and I throw a little birdseed around in my front yard, away from my food plants in the back. That seems to help.

[The Helpful Gardener]

Vorg, you need to trust Mother...

Even if there are a few chemicals in the ink, we are just starting to find out how much remediation Mother Nature does herself with biology.

[url=https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world.html]Paul Stamets[/url]did some amazing restoration with just one type of mushroom; imagine what several dozen species of soil fungii could accomplish...

Turns out the the low level build-up of antibacterials that had many folks worried a few years back are being taken care of...by soil bacteria. No foolin'. You couldn't make this stuff up.

The old inks were nasty; the new ones are ok. I used office paper by the bagful in a vermicomposter for years with no ill effect to worms, soil biology, or any other lliving things (if you don't count trees)...

Compost is HOW these things get cleaned up. Trust...

[rot]

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Was it Wordsworth who said he'd gladly trade the cherries in his tree for the song the birds bring?
..

[rot]

..
Tonythegradener, I bet your friend saw the video.

https://www.eclectech.co.uk/compostbin.php

to sense
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[Vorguen]

Used coffee grounds seems to appear over and over, and I have looked it up and other than they are acidic (which is good for plants that like that kind of soil like Blueberries)

well, other than that, I am having trouble seeing the magnificence of Used coffee grounds, I don't see how beneficial they would be for me in the amount we'd have them because my wife and I hardly drink coffee and there are no easily accessible starbucks for us. There is one, but we don't go by it very often.


Just trying to find out for what reason they are supposed to be so amazing. lol