Composting Bay Turn Green Waste Into Organic Soil
Compost Bay - making a new pile of soil. Back pile is soil at 4 weeks of age.
We have built a larger composting bay to manage all our green waste. It was really quick and easy and we used recycled corrugated iron and metal star pickets that we found on the hard waste.
We chose a flat area with a reasonable sized flat landing area in front of the bay to allow for manouvering wheelbarrows and also enough mowing space to finely chop our greens on location. We also chose an area where we can easily move the soil by wheelbarrow to all our different vegetable growing beds using a wheelbarrow. This was difficult for us a we are on a steep block, but we have managed to create ramps and avoid stairs as moving soil and soil making is heavy work!
All we did was build 3 walls to keep the compost in. We found that it was most important to get the length of the bay quite long, ours is about 3.5 metres long x 1 metre wide. This allowed us to have 3 different stages of composting piles on the go at once and we can easily shuffle piles along or mix them together if we need.
To make the soil we generally mix 3 different types of composting materials:
- Green waste; such as vegetable/garden scraps, green non-woody weeds or grass
- Manure; this is the nitrogen component for soil – we generally use horse, but sometimes chicken or cow
- Dry organic waste; this is the carbon component of soil – we generally use straw, dry leaves (not from our indigenous plants though, we usually use from Oak or Plane trees in local parks) or paper (newspaper or cardboard boxes – nothing with glossy print)
Finely chopped green waste using a lawn mower.
We mix these in at roughly the same ratios 1:1:1. Mixing them together well as this adds oxygen which is important and also water to ensure that it is all well moistened. We cover our pile with plastic to keep moist (and avoid getting too soggy if raining), and try to re-mix every week. Depending on the seasonal temperature and how warm the compost gets the breaking down and turing into soil can take about 4 – 8 weeks before it is ready to add back to our vegie gardens.
Making our own compost is great for conditioning soil. It adds life such as microbes (important bacteria and life we can’t see) as well as other invertebrates/insects like worms and composting bugs etc, which help structure the soil. Compost is also great for improving the ability of soil to hold water.
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Thank you! I have three compost bays (also with corrugated iron and stakes – recycled of course). I have at times combined piles to make new ones etc. It is a real pain moving contents from one bay to another. But if I take the walls out it will be easy! From now on it is going to be one long bay!
Lucky for us everyone throws away all the treasures that we can use to build such handy items as compost bays. We had that same issue moving soil in our old multi bay compost – it is so much easier now as one long bay.
I have done it and I love it. Thanks again. I did blog about it … maybe a week ago. I had a couple of comments from people who said they were going to follow suit. You may have started a trend!