How to Compost Yard Trimmings with 4 Ways
Are you tired of your yard trimmings taking ages to break down? Or you made a stinky, smelly mess of grass clippings? Maybe you haven’t tried and want to know all about it before you make your first pile. If so, this article is for you for I will be teaching you how to compost yard trimmings.
Composting can be complicated, but you can compost almost anything biodegradable if you know its basic concepts.
I currently have two worm bins that eat all of my kitchen scraps, and I have successfully made several cold and hot compost piles.
In this article, we will go all the significant ways to compost your yard trimmings efficiently, whether you have a small yard or big yard, and yes, you can compost with only yard trimmings.
Table of Contents
Basics of composting
There are lots of things that can go in the compost. But there are several things you should avoid.
Compost: Fruits, vegetables, grass, eggshells, tea bags, cardboard, non-shiny paper like printer paper, coffee grounds, lint
Do not Compost: Meat, dairy, oils, bones, or processed food, diseased plants or weeds, kitty litter, animal feces, charcoal ash.
Compost consists of green material and brown material. Green material is high in nitrogen, and brown is high in carbon. You must combine both of them to get the right compost mix.
Green: green leaves, green grass, kitchen scraps, spent coffee grounds, green garden clippings.
Brown: Dry leaves, Hay(brown grass), cardboard, paper & newspaper, sawdust, twigs and branches, eggshells, pine needles, and cones.
Make Your Mix With Only Grass Trimmings
It’s straightforward to make your green and brown material with only what you cut with the mower. The freshly cut grass is your green material, and if you spread that grass out and allow it to dry it, it will become hay or your brown material. Mix the two, and you will have everything you need to create beautiful compost. Of course, you should add kitchen scraps and eggshells so the pile will be more nutrient-dense, but it’s not terrible without them.
How to Compost Yard Trimmings with Cold Compost
Cold composting is the easiest method of turning your yard trimmings into compost. It is, however, the most extended way, taking anywhere from 6-12 months.
Pros:
- Not labor-intensive: there is no need to turn hundreds of pounds of pre-compost every few days.
- Simple: no need to worry about layering green and brown material, keeping the nitrogen to carbon ratio perfect, or maintaining the correct temperature to make hot compost.
- Any size: you can do cold compost in a 5-gallon bucket or a five cubic yard pile. You can also build the stack slowly over time, adding as you get more.
- Save money: if you have the sanitation worker collect your yard waste, you could easily save that money by building a cold compost pile. If you let it sit on the dirt, the mound will slowly absorb into the soil. You can add to one pile for years and never overflow with compost.
- Compact: cold compost gets more compact the longer it sits. It’s nature’s perfect compressor of materials. Perfect if you don’t have a lot of space or waste.
Cons:
- Nutrient leech: because cold compost sits for such a long time, the beneficial nutrients leak out of the pile’s bottom whenever it rains. So you can imagine how much it rains over 12 months. You can get around this by covering the mound.
- Hard to get compost: the compost is at the bottom of the pile, and you will have to dig for it. The compost will also be more coarse and dense. You can use cold composting bins to help out. They have an opening at the bottom where you can pull the compost out.
- Ugly: cold compost looks ugly and may upset your neighbors if they see it. The top of the pile will most likely have weeds, mold, fungus grass, other plants growing on it. The rotting material must sit there for a year so that the pile will be a permanent look to your house.
- Pests and diseases: since the pile does not heat up, it will not kill harmful bacteria or weed seeds. If you add kitchen scraps to your mound, you may have rodents rummaging through the mass. You can avoid this by burying any kitchen scraps into the pile and not putting diseased plants or weeds that have gone to flower into your accumulation.
- Smelly: the more compact the pile gets, the less air can get into the heap, creating an excellent environment for stinky anaerobic bacteria to thrive. You can avoid this by doing a partial turn over or poking holes into the pile infrequently.
What to do?
You simply dump whatever you have in a pile and wait. If you want to keep it from stinking, you can poke some holes for aeration every few weeks and try to keep the carbon amount high. Compost will be made from the bottom up, so you will need to dig out your compost whenever you want to use it.
Overall, Cold compost is an excellent method if you do not want to put a lot of effort into it. It is quite challenging to make the perfect conditions for hot compost, and if you don’t want the hassle, cold is the way to go. Besides, it’s nature’s best way of doing it! Think about it. Wherever you go into a forest, the soil always looks great!
How to Compost Yard Trimmings with Hot compost
Hot compost is the fastest way to change a massive amount of yard waste into black gold compost, taking only a month to break down. It is also the most complicated way, requiring the correct mix of green and brown material, water, and aeration to heat up.
It works by creating a perfect environment for aerobic bacteria that quickly break down the pile. As they reproduce and eat, the activity heats the heap to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. This temperature will also kill weed seeds, harmful bacteria, and pests.
It is possible to create compost with grass only. You would need to let some grass turn into hay and use it as your mixture’s carbon. Try it out!
The perfect carbon to nitrogen ratio is 30:1 or 30 parts Carbon to one part nitrogen; your pile will be mostly carbon.
Don’t get too hung up on the numbers, though. You can make great compost without knowing what to put in there. After a few tries, you can easily make a pile heat up.
Pros:
- It creates the most amount of compost in the least amount of time.
- The process kills weeds and harmful bacteria.
- It looks clean if placed in a GEOBIN, and it doesn’t need to take up much space.
Cons:
- Complicated: many factors can cause the pile not to heat up
- Labor intensive: you will need to turn over hundreds of pounds of compost regularly.
- Material added must be small or ground up: if you add coarse material, it will take too long to decompose, and your finished product will take a lot longer.
- Need a big pile: you need one cubic yard of material to start a hot compost, and you need it all at once.
- Pitchfork for turning: a shovel won’t cut it.
- This compost bin: it honestly makes it so easy; I wouldn’t do it without it.
- Compost thermometer: it is cheap and will tell you if you are doing it right efficiently. Or you can burn your hand, sticking it into the pile as other people tell you to do lol.
- Tarp: To cover if it rains excessively.
- Strength and endurance: you will need to mix and stir the pile daily during the process. It’s a great full-body exercise!
What to do:
First, you will need to start with a large pile, at least one cubic yard in size, or it won’t heat up. The easiest way is to mow the grass once, dump the clippings out, and spread them out flat in the sun so they dry. The next time you mow again, combine the fresh grass with the hay, and you should have a sizable compost pile to start making black gold!
I would only make sure you add fine or grounded material to help bacteria break it down faster. The best way to do this is to run it over with the lawnmower, if possible. If using kitchen scraps, use your food processor to grind the material to a paste.
As a beginner, keep it simple using one pitchfork full of nitrogen/greens to 2 pitchforks of carbon/brown. So if you are composting yard trimmings, it would be two forks of hay to one fork of fresh grass.
- Put your material into the bin evenly mixed, not layered. Wait four days for bacteria levels to build.
- If the temperature does not build, there are several ways to correct it.
- Make sure your carbon to nitrogen ratio is correct. Too much carbon and it won’t heat, and too much nitrogen will become a stinky, gooey mess.
- Ensure your pile is moist but not soggy. It should feel like a wrung-out sponge.
- Properly aerated the pile. Poke holes in it with your pitchfork.
- Unsnap the GEOBIN or lift it and off the pile after four days and push it over.
- With a pitchfork, mix the pile a little and place it back into the compost basket.
- Repeat every two days for two weeks, checking the temperature. It should be 140F at first then gradually come down as composting is complete.
- After about three weeks, the pile should be done and cool. It should be dark and crumbly and have a pleasant earthy smell.
- Let it cure for about a month for the best results. The pile will stabilize and even out. Some pockets may still be hot and have fully composted the nutrients.
Hot Compost is a challenge! But if you do it right, you will have all the Black gold you will ever need and never spend a penny at the store!
How to Compost Yard Trimmings with Vermicompost
Vermicomposting is making compost using special worms. The most common type of worm used is Eisenia foetida, also known as red wigglers.
I have two compost systems, and I bought the worms from this reputable dealer.
It’s relatively simple, and you can even do it inside your home! It doesn’t smell if you do it right, and you can have compost all year round from your kitchen scraps. Mine is kept in the garage most of the year.
Pros:
- It’s a simple and efficient way to turn kitchen scraps into worm castings, great for plants.
- Worm towers are fantastic inside, and some worm towers can even be part of your decoration in your home.
- It’s a low touch method. You put food in and harvest casting out.
Cons:
- You need to handle worms regularly. It might creep you out.
- You need to maintain a healthy environment to keep the worms alive: proper temperature, drainage, moisture, etc.
- Slow compost return: you can only harvest casings every few months.
- Challenging to get compost: you either need to remove the worms from the casings manually one by one, or you need to bait them out of the finished casings by placing food away from it. Even after this, eggs may still be present in the compost.
What do you need?
- 2 five gallon buckets
- Power drill for drilling holes
- Mesh like old window screens
- Trowel or three prongs hand cultivator
- newspaper for bedding (no shiny paper, small amounts of printer paper)
- worms from uncle Jim’s
How to do it?
- Get a minimum of 2 buckets.
- Drill holes into the bottom of one bucket. I use several different sizes. I have some problems with worms leaving the bin.
- Drill holes in the lid. To prevent worms from escaping, make the holes small but not tiny.
- Cut the mesh so it can line the bottom of the bucket.
- Put the mesh inside the bucket and place several inches of bedding.
- Put the bucket with the holes into the bucket without holes.
- Add your worms and a small amount of food. They won’t eat a lot for the first few days.
- Wet the material down; it should only be damp, not soggy. The excess water should trickle down to the second bucket; you can empty it at any time. You should only have to do this once every time you add bedding.
- Put your bin in a warm location. I put mine in the garage.
- Monitor the bin. You should check weekly in the bottom container to see if any worms are there. If there are several, then they are trying to escape from something.
Maintenance:
For best results, use a food processor to grind up the food. Processed food is effortless for the worms to eat, and they will process compost faster, keeping the gnats and other bugs embedded in your kitchen scraps from infesting the bin.
Don’t overfeed: Adding too much food will make the bin stink and attract bugs. Worms and their castings never smell bad. So if you do it right, you can do it indoors and even in the kitchen!
Bedding: make sure you are generous with worm bedding. I accidentally started making a hot compost in my worm bin, killing many worms. You can rarely add too much bedding.
Moisture: worms can only live in a wet environment. Whenever you check the bin, make sure your bedding is damp.
Leachate: overtime the composting process will create a brown-colored liquid. This water contains bacteria and toxins that may be harmful to humans. Do not add to your vegetable garden, for you don’t want your edible plants to absorb it. Dump it on your grass or down the drain.
Worm tea: a standard method of nutrient extraction is to seep worm castings in water overnight. The beneficial microbes and nutrients leech into the water, and you can then water your garden with liquid fertilizer! Don’t get this confused with leachate.
Worms are a great addition to any gardeners compost, and you can combine it with other methods to keep the landfills empty of your biodegradable waste!
How to compost yard trimmings in-ground
Why not let nature do all the work for you with a zero-touch method of composting?
With this method, you bury the material you want the compost to be and forget about it. It will break down and feed your plants in one step!
Another method is to use buckets, aka “digester,” drill large holes in them and bury them into the ground to the lid. Add your clippings and worms, and bacteria will come in from the environment and break it down. When it’s ready, dig it up and use it wherever you want it!
Pros:
- Simplicity: most simple of all compost methods, requiring the least equipment.
- Less restrictive: you can add orange peels and uncrushed eggshells
- Efficient: uses nature’s effective composting methods of critters, earthworms, and bacteria.
Cons:
- must have space to dig holes and bury materials.
- Takes a long time: 2-6 months to digest.
- Best used for kitchen scraps.
How to do it:
2 Methods of in-ground composting.
1. Dig and drop method
- Basic, dig a hole where you want the compost, drop the waste, cover it back up.
2. Food Digester bin
- Drill lots of big holes into a bucket and bury it. Add your food waste and carbon to make sure it doesn’t heat up or get stinky and let nature do the rest.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Can compost go bad?
No, Compost cannot go bad. It will slowly lose its potency over time because the decomposing process doesn’t stop. It can, however, smell bad if you don’t observe proper composting etiquette.
Can compost catch fire?
Compost piles catching on fire are rare because the mound needs to be moist to heat up. It’s like a deadman switch. When the compost dries out, it will also cool down, creating a safe environment for composting.
Can compost be used as mulch?
Mulch is any material that cannot support any plant life and prevents weeds from growing, and retains moisture. Anything from bark, gravel, and wet leaves can prevent undesirable plants from sprouting.
Compost is made of organic material that is also a soil amendment, so plants will quickly grow in and through it. So no, you cannot use compost as mulch.
Can compost be used as potting soil?
No, Potting soil is made from materials designed not to compact or decompose quickly and drains well. It is made mainly of peat moss and perlite. If you add compost, then the material will become compact and waterlogged.
Can compost burn plants?
Yes, compost is a soil amendment; if you add too much or the wrong type, you can cause nutrient deficiencies or toxicity in plants.
How does composting benefit the environment?
It keeps the biodegradable stuff out of the landfill and helps your garden at the same time! When it sits in the dumps, it creates toxic leachate that poisons the ground.
Conclusion:
Learning how to compost yard trimmings doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult. Each of the 4 methods create great quality compost so don’t get hung up too much on which type you should use. did you also know that you can add thatch to your compost as well? check out this article to find a good rake that will help you clean the debris off your yard.
