![]() ![]() Carbon-rich material, by comparison, tends to be drier and coarser, and slower to break down.įor better results, think about being more strategic when you’re gathering materials during future cleanups, especially in the fall, said Charles Dowding, an English market grower and the author of “No Dig: Nurture Your Soil to Grow Better Vegetables with Low Effort.” The popular organic, no-till practices he teaches rely on an annual top dressing of compost to keep the soil in prime condition. Anyone who has heaped up lawn clippings and then watched what happens knows the slimy, sloppy, smelly mess that results when you have too much green. Novak, who is also the founder and director of Growing Chefs, a field-to-fork food-education program, lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where she composts in her backyard, too.Īlso: Without worrying about the exact brown-to-green proportions, try to consciously incorporate both elements as you feed the pile. “Become comfortable with decomposition as a natural act, one that will take place whether you are involved or not,” said Annie Novak, the manager of the Edible Academy at New York Botanical Garden. We backyard composters can go a little easier on ourselves and still have great results, producing soil-improving bounty from our organic waste. Commercial composting operations rely on those rules, and the science behind them, to produce material that is consistent and meets regulatory guidelines. Yes, there are lists and rules that it’s tempting to get attached to: the precise ratio of high-carbon ingredients (often called “browns”) to high-nitrogen ones (“greens”), or achieving the ideal temperature for peak activity by particular bacteria and other decomposer organisms. We make the whole process too hard by fixating on details instead of the big picture. When it comes to composting, where things break down - or don’t - is often where we get in our own way. ![]()
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