Quote:
Originally Posted by BlackThumb
Imagine you have a sunflower growing in a large pot of soil. When that sunflower dies, how could you reuse the soil?
I read that you can mix it half-and-half with soil from a compost heap, but I don't have one, and my Mum doesn't want one.
Could you mix fertiliser into it? Or what about crop rotation? (We learnt about it at school, but I can't remember how it works).
It seems counter-productive to keep buying more compost, when gardening is supposed to be economical.
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Getting the right mixture of brown (carbon) materials, to green (nitrogeneous) materials will make a huge difference. Adding too much brown material will result in a compost pile that takes a long time to break down. Adding too much green material will result in a compost pile that is slimy and smelly that doesn't break down well. In order for your compost pile to break down quickly and efficiently you should feed it just the right balance of brown and green materials.
The microorganisms in our compost bins need both carbon and nitrogen to thrive; carbon for energy and nitrogen for protein synthesis. For every one unit of nitrogen used by the bacteria they also consume about 30 units of carbon. So in order to keep the bacteria working efficiently we need to supply them with a mixture that is about 30 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen. Needless to say, most materials don't have a ratio of 30:1. However, if we know the approximate C:N ratio of the materials we use in our compost, we can combine them so that the total mix will be close to 30:1.