What is compost?

Compost is basically broken down organic material. Anything is compostible. I do a lot of talks to garden groups and I enjoy talking about compost because people are kind of shocked about how compost is actually used around the world. There are municipal treatment facilities that treat human sewage and they use wormy composting. They use worms that will eat the human sewage and then they get earthworm castings out of it. The earthworm castings are then put back into the economy and sold at local garden centers and grocery stores.

There's also a compost called "humanure". That's compost with human manure. There are facilities in the U.S. that produce it, and products available that are humanure based. Anything that is organic based can be composted. So things that are composted are any type of "green waste," grass clippings, leaves, tree branches that have been ground up. Stable manures and a lot of industrial products like coffee grounds from coffee shop, the coffee shaft, which is what they remove from the coffee bean, which the companies produce in hundreds of cubic yards per day. All these things are generally routed in a lot of cities to a municipal composite facility, then it is broken down. When I tell the home gardener about what to put in your compost pile, you can even use paper. You don't to want to use the glossy, colored stuff, but any office paper, tissue paper. Even an old 100 percent cotton T-shirt. Almost everything go into a compost pile that can be broken down. In a healthy compost pile, you almost have a representative of everything from the entire animal kingdom in there. You have fine molds, bacteria, fungi, earthworms, mites, beetles, the whole gamut. These things are certain to be easily eaten by organisms. If we didn't have these organisms, we would be up to the sky in waste because they are our decomposers.

When I am describing compost to people I explain that this decomposing process is naturally happening as it would happen in any type of natural forest. You will have leaves that fall from top of the trees, hit the ground and are slowly decomposed. Then you have the first flare that used to be the leaf litter now becomes the humus which is transitional compost that is not completely broken down, and then it becomes top soil. Then the plant reuses the nutrients and it creates more leaves. So, you are just using the natural cycles that have developed here on the planet. So when you're doing composting at home, you are obviously speeding up that cycle by using things like compost bins, a compost pile and turning them. So composting is simply decomposing all the organic matter to be reused by your plants.