How to Create Compost for your Home Garden

Hi! I'm Scott Reil on behalf of expertvillage.com I would like to talk to you about tree and shrub maintenance. One of the most environmental sound things that you could do in your yard is to compost we often think of the things that fall down in our yard like leaves or twigs as garbage things that we need to haul off to the dump but what they are is mother nature way of replenishing the soil in your garden by working with those things as they do fall down in your garden you can make garden soil and mulch on your own it won't cost you anything but a few minutes of work and time. This was last years and you could see as I dig into it it is gone a good way to rotting down. Now it is not finish I will finish that off in my compost tumbler but it is most of the way to turning back in the soil. That works great for me as a mulch in my garden, I actually help it feed and add nutrients and as a mulch it helps hold moisture in my garden it also doesn't cost me a cent and pretty much when the mulch is to finish I don't need to turn it. This is where this years compost has been going you could see it is a long way from that other pile. You take a quick look through here you can see all the things that I have been putting in this my grass clipping from mowing, here is some of my leaves from cleaning up some of the garden areas, this gray powder over here is some wood ash from fires, wood ash is a great way to add carbon back in and you want to get a good mix of greens and browns. The browns are carbon your greens are going to be more nitrogen, my grass clippings as add a great green for me and the leaves and the wood ash are adding great browns. By keeping a even balance there I keep a nice mixture of bacterial and fungal components to my compost. Bacterial compost is great for feeding vegetables, annuals, perennials, and grasses. Fungal compost is great for feeding trees, shrubs and vines things that get woody. Both of them need a little bit of the other so the trees need some bacterial and grass and annuals need some bacterial and ensembles as well but if you build a good balance compost every plant in your garden is going to thank you for it.