Many you will probably agree that building an organic home garden can be cost prohibitive.
At the hardware store you might have asked yourself: “I have to buy how many bags of that expensive organic compost per square foot to amend my soil?”
Fear not!
You can make your own compost for free or very little cost in 3 easy steps:
- Gather at least a 1 sq. yard pile of dried, carbon-rich materials (dried leaves are great).
- Store your kitched/ food scraps in 5 gal. buckets withlids. You’ll need about 6 bucket (30 gal.) If you don’t have buckets, you can get them free or cheaply at fast food restaurants, etc.
- Make a lasagne: Layer one wheelbarrow of dried leaves, one bucket of food scraps until you get at least a 1 sq. yard sized pile. Keep the pile as moist as a wrung out sponge and cover it in the rain. It will get very hot (that’s good) so turn it (rip it apart, mix it up, and re-build the pile) perhaps once every 6 days at first, and then once every week and a half – or when it feels like it has cooled off.
In about 3 – 5 weeks, your compost pile should have cooled down, and smell like a forest. For the better part, It should be rich, dark brown humus.
You can build a free standing pile in your backyard, or you can build or purchase a compost bin. To make a bin, all you need is a 1 square yard sized receptacle that you can remove entirely or open in order to remove the compost.
Our home compost bin! We are currently storing dried materials in the bin and scraps in the buckets in order to build a compost pile.