Urban Garden NYC

Composting is one the best thing you do for your garden.  Check out this video for some tips on how to compost.

What is Composting and How to Do it? – as part of the expert series by GeoBeats.

What is Composting and How to Do it?

Composting is a mixture of organic materials, water and air. And, generally what we like to do is, mix it up and bring it all together, and, we hope that it turns out. Here’s an example of compost in the midst of being fully composted. So you see a lot of organic material. You see things like egg shells. You see things like old soil… , twigs… . And, this is a great example of compost in the making.

What we did was, we took this thing out of a bin, a tumbling bin that had all this together, and, the concept is that once it gets to a certain temperature, usually about a hundred and forty degrees, it really starts breaking down and decomposing. And, and, this is the result. This is the almost end result of the composting.

The dos and don’ts of composting?

Well, the main thing is, we break up composting in two different categories. We have greens, and, then, we have browns. And, what you can do, is, you can take a mixture of let’s say, one part greens to three parts browns. Now, what are greens? Greens, can be food scraps. So, when you cut a tomato and that little piece of tomato that you don’t use in the salad, that could end up in the compost and that would be considered a green which is full of nitrogen. And things like, like a plant, that’s half dead, and you don’t know what to do with… . You could cut it up and pit it in the compost. But then you mix it up with things like cardboard, existing soil and mulch, which are considered browns. And, that together with some water and some air creates compost.

People that live in apartments, for instance, wonder, How can they compost? Well, for one thing that they can do is that they could take their food scraps and take them and freeze them until they have a place to put them. Uh, and, they can go to a community compost and actually bring the food scraps frozen to the community compost and they’ll take care of the composting for them. But, there are ways of composting in an apartment. Not something I’d fully recommend, because it’s complicated. But if you’re turning the compost and you’re giving it the right amount of air and you’re giving it the right amount of water, it’ll be odorless and it’ll be effective.