Organic Compost Gardening Materials

Alright. Let's talk about the materials that we're going to use in the compost pile. We've gathered these from the garden. One of the ingredients are weeds. This is our green material that we're going to put in the compost. This is going to give the compost, possibly some heat, as it starts composting down. It'll give food for the microorganisms. But mostly, it'll give some heat to the compost. And we're going to use some garden debris. Here we have old corn cobs. I've even left some of the dirt. The roots are on there, which is all going to compost down to very good stuff. Further down, we have more garden debris. This is just from the fall garden. We raked it up, and it's going in the compost pile. Another ingredient that we're going to use is sticks. Just sticks that maybe if collect around the trees that are falling out. We're using old sticks. This is all rotten and ready to--and very dry and ready to break down. Our other ingredient--one of our other ingredients here is old hay. We find that it works very nicely, and I'm fortunate enough to find a friend who didn't use their hay from a couple years ago, so I've gotten it and it's going to be one of the ingredients. Another one of the ingredients is water. Water is very important. And here we have a barrel of water that I brought up, and you're going to want to be watering in your pile. One of our other ingredients, over here, is leaf debris. And this leaf debris, we've gathered this last fall, we've piled it up, and it's somewhat broke down, and it's in a great stage ready for the compost pile. And our final ingredient is plain old dirt. Went to the garden and we got some dirt. We're using this dirt because it already has the microorganisms in it. And they're going to filter out through the compost pile and devour that compost pile. And the microorganism is what we're inviting into this pile to break it down.