Compost - The "green" option for your garden

Chemical Fertilizers intensive use is nowadays, one of the main sources of pollution in water streams and lands. Even though its efectiveness is very high, we shouldn't forget that nature can provide us with natural fertilizers coming from the life cycle itself. This is the case of compost, an ecological alternative for your garden or kitchen garden.
Organic waste is also polluting, specially when its disposal is not under control, that is why we must consider this a useful resource and recicable.
It makes sense take advantage of the...of grafting, rotten fruits or vegetables making fertilizer with these, thanks to the land's natural cycle, that transforms in....the dead organic matter.

Making Compost

Compost is the result of organic waste decomposition.
Traditionally, all the vegetable rests from the kitchen garden were disposed in some kind of bin, then were heavily sprayed with water and finally covered, letting oxygen make its work until the organic waste became humus, in rich organic matter for the soil.
We must always mix the organic matter, we don't have to make different layers for fresh organic materials and for other material. That doesn't mean we have to remove the compost in a daily basis, but only when disposing a large amount of organic matter, for example when we have grass or dead leaves.
Making organic compost is a natural way of fertilizing the ground. Something very curious about this is that the natural decomposition process produces a nice smell, remenbering us the woods.
When trying to make a good compost, it will always be up to the amount and variety of plant rests, but as a general rule we should since we start to deposit the organic matter until we pick up compost, we will have to wait between 3 or 4 months. And in case we are looking for mature compost we must wait two more months. We can tell wheter the compost is in its early stage or mature because of the amount or organic matter that still keeps its shape, in its final stage, all this will be gone.

Normally we should water the compost so it stays wet and we help the organic matter decompose. Optionally we could add a compost biological accelerator to reduce the waiting time from 4 to 2 months.
We can find in the market the so called compost bins, tumblers specially designed to produce organic compost. If we use a compost trumbler, it's advisable to use the accelerator when we fill the compost trumbler to its maximum capacity.

Garden Compost

The advantage of compost containers is that we don't have to worry about spraying with water, as long as it is exposed to the directly to sunlight. Something we must never do is watering with large amounts of water.
We don't have to add extra soil to the compost, this would obstacle the oxigen circulation inside the compost container. We are just trying to obtain is 100% organic compost, not a mix of soil and compost.
The traditional way of composting, used the very same ground as a container, putting extra layers of soil above so the animals were not attracted there.
The compost containers also run with the advantage of not needing electricity to work. They do not require any maintenance and are specially designed and built to stay outside.

Once the compost pile is ready

We now need a sieve to separate the thin compost from the rest organic parts that may remain. Once sieved the only thing we have to do is choose the soil in which we want to put the compost.