Composting Made Easy - Using a Compost Tumbler

One of the greatest skills any gardener can learn is how to compost. An easy and effective way of providing nutrients for your garden plants while recycling much of your waste, composting is friendly for both your garden and the environment in general. There are many ways to create compost, and a compost tumbler is one of the easiest ways to do it.

A tumbler is a bit like a cement mixer, and allows you to turn your compost with little effort, meaning the material in the tumbler composts more quickly than many other types of composting. Turning compost is required to aerate the mixture, both to prevent bad odors and to provide the organisms in the compost enough oxygen. Some tumblers come with wheels, meaning you can carry your compost to wherever it is required in the garden with ease. There are other easy ways to make compost, including compost piles.

Piling compost materials can be as simple as heaping your rubbish in one place and letting it rot into compost, to building containers to hold the piles and keep them aerated and the right temperature.

If you are making compost in piles you will have to turn it regularly to keep it aerated. Otherwise the only way the material will compost is through worms completing the composting, which can take some time. It is also important that the pile of compost goes through different temperatures to support different organisms.

Whatever method you use to make compost, whether using a tumbler or a pile, it is important to use more than one type of material, as you need an adequate carbon-nitrogen ratio for the material to compost. Some materials that will compost easily include grass clippings and lucerne straw.

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