[Music plays]
(Kevin Handreck) Have you ever thought of making compost?
It's really very simple. There are several ways that you can do it
but the principles are the same for all of them.
This is a rather large heap in the Adelaide Hills on a farmer's place
and you can see that the heap here has been made from
various animal manures. There's horse droppings and whatnot there,
there's straw and sawdust and bits of chicken litter and so on.
It looks a pretty rich mixture. Let's see how it's working.
Wow, look at all that steam there.
It's really going very well.
The reason why this heap is working so well
is it has just the right balance of materials
and the right moisture content.
Now your heap probably won't be as big as this in your back garden
and you may not have the same sort of materials
but I'm going to show you how it's possible
for you to be just as successful as this.
You need high nitrogen materials and some low nitrogen materials.
High nitrogen materials are weeds from the garden,
various scraps and all these green sort of things,
things from the kitchen, animal manures particularly poultry manure.
They're all high nitrogen materials
and the low nitrogen materials can be sawdust,
straw, leaves from out in the street anywhere, twigs that come with them.
The balance that you need is something like three or four parts
of these high nitrogen materials to about one part
of these low nitrogen materials. Let's add them to the heap.
The materials have to be mixed together fairly thoroughly
and they also have to be of just the right moisture content.
These are a bit dry still so we'll add some water to them.
The thing is that the bugs, the bacteria
and fungi that are going to be doing the composting for us
are just like us. They need oxygen and they need water
and we have to get the right balance in this heap.
Let's see. The way to check for moisture content
is with the squeeze test. I'm squeezing the mix now
and you can see water coming out of there.
That's just right so this heap's ready to go.
It's got the right balance between high and low nitrogen materials
and the right balance between oxygen and water.
Now if you're in a hurry to get compost
then what you need to do is to turn this heap every few days adding water,
making sure that the oxygen concentration is high enough
in there for the bugs to really keep working
and in three weeks you should have reasonably mature compost.
Now if you're not in a hurry
the best thing to do is just to leave all these materials in
the heap for about three months and at the end of that time
you'll have something that's like this.
Beautiful, isn't it?
Even if you live in the inner city
you can still do your bit in recycling organic matter.
If you think you need a lot of space to make compost think again.
Let me show you down here.
The ideal solution to making compost in a small yard like this
is a compost bin. It's really very easy to manage a bin like this.
All you need to do is to sit it on the ground
and then start putting in anything that you might have used
in a big compost heap, kitchen rubbish,
old flowers, weeds from the garden.
Just make sure that the mixture is moist enough
so you can put a sprinkle of water on from time to time
and if you're using a lot of orange peels or other citrus peelings
that are very acid it's worthwhile just putting a sprinkling of lime
over the top of the mix every now and again in there.
After a few months you're going to have something nice.
Let's have a look and see what we've got down here now.
Wow look, isn't that terrific? Look at it.
Magnificent and that was rubbish only a short time ago.
You can use your compost almost anywhere in the garden.
You can put it under the mulch around your plants like so.
Put the mulch back if you want to or you can
just sprinkle it all round on the garden here, a good generous helping.
The rain will soon wash the nutrients down into the soil to the plant roots.
In the vegetable patch or where you want to grow bedding plants
it's probably best to dig the compost into the ground before you plant.
Probably the only exception to that is where you're growing carrots
because if you have a lot of rich compost in the soil under carrots
the roots can fork and get other sorts of distortions.
Another use for compost is as a top dressing on pot plants.
You can just put it around like that. Not too much
otherwise you may reduce the drainage of water down through the pot.
These plants will soon be thriving on the compost we've given them.
Can you think of a better use for your rubbish? I can't.