Managing Green Garden Waste At Home
Lawn mowing green waste to finely chop it.
We have a worm farm which composts all our kitchen scraps, but as we also grow a lot of our own food we have to manage much larger amounts of green material. Of course this green garden waste is actually a big resource when we we turn it into organic and nutrient rich soil, which we then return to our fruit & vegetable garden beds. By composting we manage all our green waste on site closing this recyling loop, this minimises transport costs (and fuel) and also avoids spreading weeds to another area to be managed.
The green material mostly includes all of our plant waste from vegetable growing, such as plants of corn, tomatoes, brassicas like cauliflower and broccoli etc after harvesting the food compontents. Green material also includes lots of grass both weedy and indigenous are fine and also any soft (non woody) weeds.
We don’t add any of our indigenous plants for composting, particularly woody parts as they are harder to break down into soil and also woody material can often deplete soil of nutrients – where we are wanting to create nutrient rich soils. All our garden waste from indigenous plants, such as lopped branches etc we return to the bush areas of our block as this provides great ground cover as a natural mulch and also great habitat for smaller wildlife particularly insects. It is most important to ensure that no seeds from non-indigenous plants get thrown out in the bush though – we are very strict about this to keep our bush habitat healthy.
Compost bins for green waste collection - plant pots.
We have found that the best way to manage all our green waste for processing into soil is to collect it in bins around our block. We found that large old plant pots are great as they have holes in the bottom and let out the rain and any juices from green material if it starts rotting etc. We have these bins near to every area where we grow fruit and vegetables, so that it is really easy and tidy mainting all our green garden waste. About once / month we round up all our greens and then chop them as finely as we can so that they can break down quickly in our composting bay.
We have seen many people use mulchers to help them chop up their green material, but we just use a neighbours lawn mower and mow over the top of the greens on a flat area. It all provides the same result of finely chopped greens ready for composting.
facebook 
twitter 
email 
