Earth Matter NY, Inc.

There are many recipes for making compost yourself speeding-up the process that nature does naturally. Following a recipe can allow you to cook-up enough compost to meet the needs of your garden or an entire farm. Our recipe is quite simple:

Separate the materials into two lots: “Browns” and “Greens”.

Browns are carbon rich sources such as fallen leaves, wood chips, cut-up pieces of dead twigs and branches, wood shavings from wood working that doesn’t contain plywood or other chemically treated lumber, soiled NYC newspaper, napkins, paper towels, or other paper that would otherwise be un-recyclable, and dried plant husks, seeds and shells.

Greens are nitrogen rich sources such as coffee grounds, fruit and vegetable scrapes, grass clippings, green leaves, spent grains, flower stems, and droppings from animals that only eat plants.

Mix at least 50% Brown Materials with the remainder amount of Greens in a lasagna style fashion. Starting which Browns, then layering an equal amount of Greens, then Browns, and Greens, continuing until you finish with a final top coat if browns.

Depending on the size of the pile, and the coarseness of your browns,  turn your pile every week to three weeks, to keep the pile light and aerated.

Try and build a pile from the start that is large enough to create a condition of 140 degrees internal temperature for at least 5 days in a row at some point early in the composting process. High temperatures will ensure that diseased plants, bread mold, and weed seeds will be killed. If you can’t achieve these higher temperatures then limit the use of moldy, diseased, and weed vegetative matter.

The compost is done once it looks like compost and the temperature has fallen below 65 degrees for four weeks. Additional time may be needed, for worms and other cold process organisms to complete the task in the event of small piles that have not achieved higher temperatures and in piles where either excessive Greens, or Browns were used.

If a pile is too wet, the moisture will coat the carbon rich resources and preventing them from grabbing on to available nitrogen as it escapes the green materials. This will produce the non-composting process of rotting. It will smell bad like rotting material. To reduce moisture add more dry brown materials, and cover the pile loosely to prevent rain from over saturating the pile.