- A staggering 28% or more of food waste
just goes to a landfill, completely wasted,
absolute tragedy,
and sitting right here is one of the best ways
to repurpose that and throw it back in the garden.
But there are a ton of myths and misconceptions
about composting, which we're gonna bust in today's video.
Myth number one, is it compost?
Smells bad.
Honestly, that smells fresh, that smells sweet.
Why? Because it's a well-managed epic pile of compost.
A poorly-managed pile will smell bad.
That's your signal that you're doing something wrong.
There's about four things you can do wrong.
Number one is you've built the pile incorrectly
so it's very compacted
and there's anaerobic pockets in the pile.
Anaerobic means lack of oxygen,
compost, this is an aerobic hot composting process.
So anaerobic, you'll get these bacteria
that smell honestly like doo-doo,
they do not smell good whatsoever
so you'll need to rebuild the pile to troubleshoot that.
You can also have too many greens.
That's probably the more common one.
Sometimes too many browns can smell,
too wet of a pile.
And then finally, you can add fats, oils, meats.
Some of these things that are often recommended
to not put in compost.
They can rot out and have a sort of sulfuric foul smell.
There's actually a method of composting
that works really well for those fats and meats
called Bokashi Composting which is an anaerobic process
and we've done a full video on.
Misconception number two is that a compost pile
has all sorts of bugs in it,
all sorts of rats and and rodents and vermin.
And yeah, that can be true.
I'll address the bugs first.
In a proper hot composting pile, you have at least
a three cubic feet area or one cubic yard.
We'll put the meters up on the screen.
In the center,
you're gonna have most of that heat generation.
At the edges, it starts to go a little colder,
and that's where some of those larger decomposers,
like your worms and your pill bugs and your arthropods
start to come in so that's actually quite normal
to have bugs around the perimeter
and at the bottom of a compost bin.
Now, rats and vermin,
that's a little bit of a different story.
There's different ways that you can prevent that.
One would be using a compost tumbler
or a fully screened-in situation
and then you'll get things like maggots in compost
and all sorts of different sort of creepy crawlies
that they might be a little unsightly for you.
The best thing I can recommend for that
is to cover with straw or leaves to try to keep them out,
maybe add a little bit more rounds.
But all this to say it's really not as big a deal
as I think you might think.
And half of those, the bugs are actually kind of good.
The biggest myth that keeps the most beginners
from really getting into composting
and having a great time with it
is that they think it's too complicated.
They think they need some sort of fancy recipe or process
to really get perfect compost.
For example, you need a 30:1 carbon - nitrogen ratio
so you need to calculate the ratio of your greens
and your browns, then put 'em all into a spreadsheet
and figure out the perfect blend,
and then raise it to 160 Fahrenheit three times to make sure
it's broken down.
You could do that.
You could, and certainly I have some friends that love
getting that deep with it.
I actually really enjoy that part of the process.
But to get started, you could take something as simple
as 50% greens, 50% browns, and throw 'em in a pile
and forget about it, and that still counts as composting.
The fourth myth is that it just simply takes too long
to get perfect compost as the output,
and it's just not worth it.
And while that can certainly be true,
if you want to get really wild with it
I'll give you the recipe.
I'll give you the thing to follow.
It's called the Berkeley Method.
It's one that works really well
for an actively-managed hot compost pile.
So what you'll want to do, take greens,
take browns, roughly by volume, put them in at 50/50
and then turn that pile, make sure it's nice and aerated
and then you'll want to heat it up
to 130 to 150 degrees Fahrenheit for four days.
Then, after that, take a fork like this,
come on in, and turn it every two days for 14 days.
And then in about 18 days
you'll have really well-broken down compost.
But like I said, that's actively-managed hot compost.
If you're a home gardener who doesn't want
to get that deep into it,
you can do something like I'm doing right here.
I've gotta compost thermometer in here.
This was at about 150 to 160 Fahrenheit
for maybe a week or so, and now it's slowly cooled off
to, I don't know, about 80.
And what I'll do if I want to restart this pile
and break it down a bit further is move it on down
this row here and just sort of rebuild the pile that way,
and by the time it gets to the end
it'll be pretty damn close to a finished compost.
But I'm not stressing
because this part of the gardening process for me
I like to take it a little bit easier.
One of the more pervasive myths is that hot composting
will completely and totally kill off any weed seeds
that you find in the garden and toss into the pile.
Take this guy right here.
The idea is that if I throw this in,
just let it be, these are gonna be dead
and I can then freely spread that compost
without fear of spreading the weed seeds.
It's true, but you have to heat that pile up
to 140 Fahrenheit for over 36 hours
and make sure all those seeds are in that hot zone.
And as we've learned, that just might not be
your composting journey or your particular process.
One powerful thing that you can do is get to them
before the seed heads form in the season,
cut 'em all outta the garden,
maybe a nice rainy day where the soil's nice and loose.
Pop 'em in a pile, let them completely die and dry out
and then work them into the pile.
And actually, weeds are weirdly a gardener's best friends.
We have six different tips on turning these
into garden gold on this video right here.
As always, if you want awesome gardening products
that have been tested by us that we love,
they're on our shop, shop.epicgardening.com
and our seed company Botanical Interests.
Until next time, good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.