How To Make Compost For Your Vegetable Garden

You can make compost for your vegetable garden from scraps in your kitchen. Compost will add much-needed nutrients to the soil to help your vegetables grow. You can purchase it, but why would you when you can use the throw-away food that you have in your kitchen each day.

Coffee grounds and their filter, fruit and vegetable peels like potato peels, apple peels, onion skins, the parts of celery lettuce, carrots, and cabbage that you won't eat, egg shells, apple cores, banana peels, melon rinds...

When I was a child, my dad always planted a garden. He had a large metal drum in the yard that he used to make compost for the vegetable garden. He taught me to make it and all of a sudden, I was in charge of collecting scraps, dumping them into the drum, adding dirt, and stirring it up. We would start in February and by April, when the danger of frost had passed in New York State, we would add it to our veggie garden and grow wonderful tomatoes and cucumbers.

Get some sort of a large bin and put it outside in the backyard. Make sure it has a lid to keep bugs and varmints out. Put a few inches of dirt at the bottom and add some food scraps. Then cover the scraps with a little dirt. Each time you add food, put a little dirt on it to cover it. After a few days, stir it with a stick before adding more scraps and dirt. After a while, the food all decays and the compost is ready to be added to the garden soil. Add the compost in to your soil and mix it in good with a shovel before planting your vegetables.

It is so incredibly easy to make compost for your vegetable garden. If an eight-year-old girl could do it back then, you can do it now. Just make sure not to use any meat, dairy, rice, or pasta to avoid fats in your compost and to avoid rats being in your backyard.

I keep a large bowl on my counter each day and I put all of my scraps in it throughout the day while I cook. I add my egg shells and coffee grounds from breakfast. Then pepper cores, cucumber peels, carrot peels, celery stems, broccoli and cauliflower stems, lettuce stems, and any other veggie parts that are not usable. Each evening after dinner, I dump the bowl into my compost bin, wash the bowl, and it is ready for use the next morning. No bad smells, no bacteria.

Update April2012

We now keep a pottery compost bin with a lid on our kitchen counter for scraps that we bought online. It is important to remember to dump it each day or you might get fruit flies. I speak from experience! We have two large compost bins that are shaped like giant wheels on rollers. You dump in your scraps and give it a spin to mix it all in with the dirt and other stuff in there. Easy to do and looks nice as well.

Good luck as you make compost for your vegetable garden!