If you have a garden, then composting is a great way to recycle your green waste. Throwing all of your food scraps and garden clippings into a bin at the back of your garden will result in a compost of sorts – but if you want a quality compost, follow these tips.
- Balance your Green and Brown Materials: Compost is formed by microbes that break down your waste and turn it into the nutrient-rich substance that you can use to fertilise your soil. These microbes feed off nitrogen and carbon. As a rule of thumb, they get the first from ‘green materials’ – this is your potato peelings, cabbage leaves and grass clippings – and the second from ‘brown materials’ such as cardboard, dead leaves and wood chips. It is generally recommended that a 2:1 ratio of green to brown materials is the best for making good compost.
- Set Your Bin on a Soil Base: This allows your compost bin to drain and lets the microorganisms and worms that live in the soil add their contribution to your compost.
- Avoid Meat Scraps and Oils: These items are also carbon based and so will decompose if you include them in your compost. However, it is usually recommended to avoid them. They can generate a smell that is both unpleasant to humans and attractive to vermin. Unpleasant smells and rats are not good garden features.
- Avoid Strong Acid or Alkaline Substances: Substances such as ashes which might seem a harmless addition to your compost bin are alkaline and will affect the pH balance of your compost. At the other end of the scale, oak leaves and pine needles are too acidic.
- Put Garden Waste on Top of Kitchen Waste: This should stop the accumulation of flies. Flies love to lay their eggs in rotting kitchen waste when they can find it. Covering with a layer of garden waste prevents this from happening.
- Provide a Good Mix of Substances: In particular, don’t fill up your compost bin with one substance – grass clippings is the usual culprit here. People will dump an entire lawn’s worth of clippings in the bin at once and then wonder why they have a slimy green mess instead of healthy brown compost.
If you want to get rid of large amounts of garden waste, but want to make sure that it is still disposed of responsibly, consider hiring a skip. We shred garden waste and turn it into compost on a larger scale. Because we have commercial shredding capabilities, we can handle branches and large prunings that won’t break down in a domestic compost bin.
Find out about our skip sizes and what projects they are suitable for on our website. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to call us on 01493 668118 or email info@wtskiphire.co.uk.
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