Composting is a great way to enrich the soil in your garden, whilst doing something awesome for the environment. It’s estimated that Isaac residents disposed of to landfill approximately 40% of domestically compostable material in their wheelie bins every year. This equates to over 11.5 million Apples or 9.5 million Bananas. For every 1 tonne of food waste that is composted at home, nearly one tonne of Carbon Dioxide is locked into soil and not released into the atmosphere.
Disposing of your kitchen organics in landfill means nutrients you could have used at home on your garden, are now locked in up in landfill in an anaerobic (no oxygen) environment, producing Methane gas (CH4) instead. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas and has up to 25 times greater impact as a greenhouse gas than Carbon Dioxide (CO2) (Yvon-Durocher, et al., 2014).
Composting is the practice of turning organics like food and garden waste into compost through the organic breakdown of plant material by bacteria and fungi. Adding composted material into your garden or lawn has so many amazing benefits such as:
- It helps your soil hold up to 20 times its weight in water. This reduces your water usage and, helps alleviate drying stress on your plants.
- It improves your soil structure and allows water, air and plant roots to easily penetrate the soil profile, which in turn improves soil health
- It delivers nutrients to the soil, delivering a food source to microbes and plants. This relationship in turn slows leaching of nutrients from the soil.
- It can act as a buffer for soil PH.
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Nitrogen rich sources (wet material)
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Carbon rich sources (dry material)
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Shredded paper (newspaper and office paper)
Moistened non-glossy cardboard (egg cartons and cardboard boxes)
Sticks (thickness less than your thumb)
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- dairy products
- manure from carnivores/omnivores (e.g. cats and dogs)
- meat scraps
- plants that are diseased or have been sprayed with pesticides and herbicides.
- plastic
- treated timber
- fats and oils (both plant and animal based)
- weed material (as it may further spread once you use your compost in the garden)
Aerate regularly! The microbes in your compost bin breathe oxygen too, as they digest and multiply, they produce CO2 and other gases, aeration gives them fresh air as well as moves the compost material around for an even breakdown.
As a rule of thumb, you should aim for every 1 bucket of green material add 1.5 buckets of brown/dry material. It is important to ensure that your compost is aerated naturally.
Place your compost in partial shade during the mid-day sun. In our Central Queensland climate, our summer can get too hot for the microbes within your compost bin, this causes the compost to effectively cook and sterilise itself of good microbes.
Your compost should be moist but not wet, if it gets to wet, add a bit of drier organic material. If it is to dry, give it a quick spray with the hose.
Yvon-Durocher, G., Allen, A. P., Bastviken, D., Conrad, R., Gudasz, C., St-Pierre, A., ... & Del Giorgio, P. A. (2014). Methane fluxes show consistent temperature dependence across microbial to ecosystem scales. Nature, 507(7493), 488-491.