Your Compost Pile Options- Scaling Size to Meet Your Needs

Transcription:

Hi, everyone. Dr. Arland Hill here with you and I wanted to review a couple of compost pile options for you. I like to think about the compost pile as multivitamins for your ground and soil that you’re going to be planting in.  It provides a ton of nutrients that you’re just not going to be able to find elsewhere, specifically one that is very well missing from a lot of different options out there is carbon. When you compost, you’re able to put organic material, carbon, back into your soil. Humus is going to be added back to the soil.

I wanted to share a couple of options with you.  What I’m going to do is start small.  So if you are someone who has, say, the option of planting in your backyard and you need some organic material to add to your garden in your backyard, I’m going to show you how to start small with that. Then we’re going to scale it up to a little bigger level. Then I’m actually going to show you how to do this if you have a bigger area that you’re trying to plant and how to keep up with this.

Compost Pile Options – Starting Small

Let me show you one option that is for smaller production like plantings in your backyard.  Or maybe you just want to nourish some of the flowers around your yard. You can grab a plastic, Rubbermaid container like this. I’ll open this up as we do this and you’ll see inside of this Rubbermaid container here.  We’ve just put some leaves in it. The addition of these leaves, we come in and we’ll take at a later date. This for us right now is acting as a store container just solely for leaves. But if you’re using this in your backyard, what you would also want to do is add various food scraps, things that are compostable items, maybe the dog hair. You do the vacuum and you need to vacuum up the dog hair. You can throw the dog hair in here. Those are good options. Those types of things are very compostable. You can add these in.

The nice thing about this, and this is absolutely something you want to consider if you’re doing compost, is you might want a cover for it. You can have this if you’re in a neighborhood and maybe the neighbors has cats, maybe there’s some critters around, some raccoons, some possum, this will help keep those kind of guys out of your compost pile.

Compost Pile Options – Stepping it Up a Level

Now, you can go up to the next level here, and you can have an even bigger type of container. With this one, this is the one that we’ve been using. We’ve outgrown this one. But the point being here is that if you have, say, just some fruit trees or if you have just a couple of plants that you’re trying to nourish as a part of your garden, this may be a good option for you. One of the interesting things that you might consider about this is that, I’ll come around over here, is that when you have something like this, it’s always a good idea to stabilize this thing.

Don’t Forget the Tea

One of the things that we’ve learned is that … You can see I’m pushing in on this. One of the things that we’ve learned is that as we’ve added to it, instead of continuing to go up, what it started to do is push out. You may want to stabilize this with some two by fours or some type of maybe treated wood in the ground just to keep it stable. But here’s the other thing and this is a little hard to see. If you want to make what’s known as compost tea where you can take the liquid off of this and use that as a part of your compost, what we’ve got down here is actually a nozzle that you can add water to this. You could run water out of it and you could collect those nutrients in a liquid format, put those in a sprayer and spray them around on different applications. That would be more of an option for medium sized use.

Now, I’m going to transition over and show you … I mentioned this is what we’re moving away from just because our needs have gotten bigger. If your needs are getting bigger, too, I’m going to show you what we’re going to transition over to right now.

Moving Away from Individual Containers

All right. When you last saw this white compost container, it was full of compost and we’ve moved that over to a different environment now, to a different compost pile. If you’re looking to upscale your compost if you have greater needs, I’m going to show you what you can move to. As opposed to a single container, we’re going to move over to actually having different bins. I’ll scoot over this way and we’ll show you. What we did was actually segment out our different fence panel here. This is actually hog panel is what this is.  We cut this up into different segments and made four bins out of this. You can see from the four bins here on the far end what was in the white container originally is now what’s down in the far end.  Among compost pile options, this is one to definitely consider as your needs get bigger.

Layer by Layer

When we were making our compost, we’ve been using leaves that have fallen down. We mulch those up and now we’ve got a specific container for those leaves, and you’ll be able to see that just right here. This makes it simple. As we’re bringing out, say, food scraps or other food-based additives or ingredients that we want to add into our compost mixture, now we’ve got a pile that we can throw that in, and we can add leaves on top of that to cover that up at a slow consistent pace as opposed to having to throw it all in one container. When it comes time to actually use the compost, we’re going to be able to pull from multiple containers, but also have other piles that are continuing to breakdown and create the content that we’re going to be looking to add to our plants.

A couple of different compost pile options for you. You can scale this down or scale this up depending on what your needs are. I just want to show you a couple of different compost pile options that are available for you on this. Listen, if you like the information that I shared with you here, make sure you share it with other people and give us a like down below. We’d appreciate that.

Hey, listen, guys. I’m Dr. Arland Hill. I look forward to talking with you in the very near future.

Another Great Resource to Get You Started

Compost Pile Options Resource