Everything You Need To Know About Compost Makers

Compost makers are designed to assist you in taking kitchen, yard and garden waste materials that you would ordinarily put into the trash and convert it into a nutrient rich soil additive for your yard, flowers or garden. The finished compost that comes out of compost makers is sometimes referred to as 'black gold' because it is rich in nutrient value for the plants and is usually very dark in color.

Advantages of Making Compost

There are many advantages to the idea of making compost. Probably the biggest one is that you are helping nature do what was originally intended to happen to all of the left over leaves and stems when plants die in the fall, and leaves land on the ground. Without human intervention, these dead parts of plants would lay where they land and slowly, over time the elements and the microbes and worms in the soil would transform the dead material into compost that would help to feed the next plants that grow in that soil. This process in nature works slowly. The material that lands on the ground this year, will probably not help the new growing plants next year. That set of plants will receive nutrients from the compost made by nature two, three or five years ago and is still sitting there available. The materials that land on the ground this year, if left untouched would be available for plants to use in the future years. It is a cycle of life, decay, and new life that is perpetual if left untouched by man or machine.

If you have ever taken a walk in a forest, you may have seen or walked on the spongy material on the ground. It is a build up of many years of tree leaves or needles and twigs falling to the ground and left there for nature to work on. Eventually this fallen material takes on a life of it's own, becoming a home for micro sized bugs, worms, beetles and other insects. Some of them prey on each other, but all of them have a purpose in the cycle of breaking down the materials into rich humus, or compost.

When we use a composter to make compost out of dead material, we are speeding up the process that nature takes so long to do. For modern man, there is a need for doing this. One reason is that we are not able to leave the material on the ground long enough to allow Nature to do the job. We want to collect our mowed grass and fallen leaves so it doesn't kill our lawn. Some cities have regulations about leaf collection and 'trashy' looking yards. Also, it could attract rodents who feed on fallen seeds and bugs in the half composted material as it piles up over the years. Most people are not inclined to let it all set, untampered and untrampled for years on end.

Another reason for using compost makers is the fact that if we did not compost the yard, garden and kitchen waste, it would just be put into a plastic bag and sent to the dump where it will sit un-composted, but rotting, forever. They have dug up landfill that was over 20 years old and found newspaper that could still be read. A dump is not a giant compost heap. The elements that nature uses to process material into compost are not present in trash buried in a landfill. It does not decompose or shrink down into an odor free black gold usable as a soil amendment when in a landfill. Our country has some truly amazing sized landfills that keep a lot of people busy covering it over with dirt to hide it. It used to be "Out of sight-Out of mind", but it cannot go on like this forever. Our landfills are huge; no one wants to live near them, but we have more people who need a place to live every day, so something is going to get crowded. We can reduce our need for landfill by as much as 60% if every household would recycle their compostable material into black gold.

One other advantage to composting is that it helps the soil to retain moisture. A garden or flower bed that is mulched and built upon a foundation of good homemade compost will not require as much watering, therefore reducing the usage of water resources. This is only important if you want to have some water to drink, bathe in, do laundry with, and you think all the new housing being built should be allowed to have a decent supply of water as well. Most large and mid sized cities are growing faster than their water supply is.

What You Will Need to Make Finished Compost:

• A Compost tumbler, bin or worm composter will help speed up the process
• A supply of materials like leaves, grass clippings, plant trimmings, vegetable waste, manures, etc.
• Water
• There are four basic elements needed for the decomposition process to work; air, water, material, and microbes. You can find more detailed information on how the process works in the related article entitled "Compost".

Compost Makers
There are quite a few styles, makes and models of compost makers. Each one has it's good features. Some of them are quite different in how they process the material you put into it. This information is brought to you by ComposterHq.com to help you make the right choice when buying a compost maker. We send most of the composter models to our experts to try out so we have first hand knowledge of how they work. Some composters have been used by people here at ComposterHQ.com for years while some of the latest models are still being tried out. We hope this site will answer most, if not all of the questions you may have and help you make the decision to own and operate your own compost maker.

Compost Tumblers

Gardeners are working smarter, not harder these days. The biggest help to making compost easier is the barrel composter. The principal behind barrel (or tumbling) composters is the action of turning the composter which agitates the compost material, mixing it, aerating it and distributing moisture more evenly throughout. Breaker bars or fins (paddles) inside the tumblers help to break up the material and keep it mixed, which allows the aerobic bacteria to break down the compost material more quickly and at a higher temperature with a more consistent finished product. Each model has it's own particular features. They all work with the same principal. They help make having a great garden, recycling and reducing waste a whole lot quicker and easier.
Choosing a Compost Bin article

Compost Bins
Compost bins also facilitate the making of compost, consisting of a stable places that contain the material. You will need to turn the pile in order to speed up the decomposition process. Turning a pile is done by using a shovel or pitchfork to transfer the material one forkful at a time from one bin to another. The turning process then puts the top of the pile on the bottom of the new pile. You can add moisture to each layer as you turn. Then the new pile or bin will need to heat up again and allow the micro-organisms to begin their work. This process takes much longer than the process inside a tumbler, and it is also a lot more labor intensive.
If you are keeping a bin for making compost on a very casual basis, meaning, you really don't care about harvesting finished compost in short order to be able to use it in your garden, etc., then you simply choose a bin that suits your objectives. Some bins are simply containers that sit on the ground to hold material together.

For a break down of our compost bins by model - read our Choosing a Compost Bin article

Worm Composters - Why Compost with Worms?

A composting worm bin system is an incredibly efficient and effective way to quickly convert your kitchen waste, cardboard, newspaper, junk mail, dried leaves and most other organic materials into the most nutrient rich compost for your plants, planters, flower beds and garden.

In nature, once-living material is slowly broken down into the nutrients that plants use. It is an ongoing process in nature's food chain. You will see it happening if you leave the grass clippings on your lawn; they dry up and then sink down between the blades of the uncut grass. This is now called thatch. If you leave the thatch alone, the layer that is on the bottom, touching the soil will begin to compost, the micro-organisms in the soil will begin to work on it, eating it and converting it.

Those micro-organisms and larger creatures like worms, will only be able to work on the portion of that they can reach, which is why the bottom layer is what is composted first. As that layer is slowly process, the upper layers sink lower into contact with the soil and provide food for those micro-organisms, worms, etc. This entire process can take up to two years to complete. If you continue to cut the lawn and leave more clippings on it, the process will never be entirely finished, as it has new fresh material to work on.