How to Video: Home Composting with Leaves
Short, sweet, and to the point. Seize the fall season and make this composter today. Before the how, let's look at the why.
Plenty of dry leaves keeps a pile smelling fresh instead of foul.
Water is important, for a good start, you can spray down the initial load of leaves, through rain and the high moisture of kitchen scraps this kind of pile usually takes care of itself as far as water.
When adding new scraps, mix them into the existing material and cover them up. This keeps down insects and when half-way composted stuff is smeared on the new scraps it can discourage animals from being interested. Over time the leaves settle quite a lot.
Take action now to keep your leaf stash flush. When you need fresh leaves, just crack open one of the bags that your neighbors conveniently put on the curb for pickup and top off the bin. Don't worry if they're a little musty or dusty later in the year. This kind of pile trades speed of composting for savings in effort.
Keep adding to the pile until it stops settling after adding new leaves and there's no more room for leaves to balance out the kitchen scraps.
For a normal household, this should take a whole year. So if you start now, this time next year you can stop adding to your pile and start a new one. Once you make your last deposit in the compost bank, it's important to let you pile age for several months. So that pile I just started today (in the video) should hold a year of my kitchen waste, then I'll use the compost in April and May of 2018. I think that long-term thinking is an expression of love for my home.
The most important think about starting a compost pile at home is that you give it a try. There's plenty of great info out there in the internet, I hope that this quick note encourages a few people to go out and save up their leaves to start their first compost pile.