what to do with old grass clippings pile
During the spring and summertime months, homeowners collect heaps of grass clippings from their lawn only to throw them abroad. Since grass clippings are an excellent source of nutrients there is no need to purse them. Instead of tossing your yard waste to the curb, enhance your compost pile with grass clippings. You lot'll be reducing waste that would otherwise exist in a landfill and converting your grass clippings to rich soil amendment for your backyard and garden.
In this guide to using grass clippings as compost I'll walk you through
- The basics of composting,
- Why grass clippings brand excellent fuel for your compost pile,
- Things to be careful about or avert, and
- Whether or not you should even pocketbook your grass clippings (vs. mulching them back to the lawn).
Allow's dive in!
An Introduction to Compost
Compost, otherwise known as black gold, is decomposed organic fabric rich in nutrients.
While it can take between 1 and 6 months until hot compost is fix, this is i of the best constitute foods for gardens and lawns. In one case complete, your compost volume will be reduced in half, it will be dark in colour, crumbly, and have an earthy aroma.
Often used for topsoil, mulch, and plant nourishment, compost is a must-have for homeowners looking to attend their garden and lawn.
Since grass clippings are nitrogen-rich and are easily available, they are ideal for compost when combined with carbon-rich materials.
There is more to composting grass clippings than tossing them aside expecting rich organic matter a couple weeks later.
A proper compost pile needs maintenance, patience, and work … just the results are worthwhile.
Composting Grass Clippings
Before composting your grass clippings, information technology is advised to conduct personal enquiry on any treatment your lawn has received.
For homeowners concerned about grass treated with herbicides, pesticides, and insecticides it is best to contact your lawn intendance provider to know what treatment (if any) where used and if it's safety for compost.
If you lot're mowing your own lawn, then you probably already know what products yous use. And if you're using organic lawn fertilizers and natural weed control methods … y'all've got nothing to worry near.
Using Grass Clippings in a Healthy Compost Pile
In lodge to generate rut, a compost pile requires a balanced mix of dark-brown (carbon-rich) and green (nitrogen-rich) material.
Fresh greens provide energy to microbes while dark-brown material supplies proteins to them.
Green (Nitrogen) Materials for Composting
Green materials include fresh grass clippings and weeds considering of their high nitrogen and water content.
Grass clippings are a great addition to the compost mix, but they should be dried for a couple of days beforehand. Household products and foods similar java grounds, vegetable peels, and eggshells are considered green material also.
Dark-brown (Carbon) Materials for Composting
Brown material includes newspapers, sawdust, onetime (thoroughly stale) grass clippings, and fall leaves. These materials are low in nitrogen and carbon-rich.
Mostly, a counterbalanced dark-brown-dark-green mix is equal weight of carbon to nitrogen fabric.
My Composting Blend
I usually aim for a 2:1 ratio of brown to green textile. I utilise shredded paper and junk mail, and sawdust from my husband's workshop for the carbon and grass clippings, coffee grounds, and veggie scraps from the kitchen for most of my nitrogen.
What to Avoid
Since grass grows in affluence and is hands available, it's tempting to source all of your light-green and brown cloth from fresh or stale grass clippings. Nevertheless, this tin can cause a couple of problems.
The first is a lack of multifariousness in your compost pile. It is important to diversify nitrogen and carbon sources to make the virtually of your compost. Therefore, grass clippings should be added in improver to other sources.
Secondly, excessive use of fresh, light-green material tin mat or rot your compost pile. Considering fresh grass clippings are mostly h2o and comprise depression levels of carbon, they can easily mat and rot if not dried or aerated regularly.
When used properly, grass clippings are a great source of nitrogen for composting.
To avoid compaction and killing microbes, routinely aerate your compost with a fork or compost tumbler (I use a couple of these ones from Amazon).
Compaction occurs when compost is not often turned and there is no opportunity for air pockets to course. Sometimes, microbes do their job likewise well and consume all the nutrients and oxygen.
Overheated and deprived of nutrients and oxygen, microbes eventually decay. Depending on the size of your compost pile and brown to green mixture, it is recommended to turn your compost pile every 3-7 days.
Should You Fifty-fifty Bag Your Clippings?
An culling to composting is using a mulch mower to return the grass clippings back into your lawn.
Otherwise known as grass cycling, recycling your lawn's clippings is a great manner to recycle nutrients and reduce thatch.
Since grass clippings are mostly h2o and have a high decomposition rate, most homeowners determine to leave the clippings on the lawn as a natural fertilizer.
While grass cycling is recommended, at that place are instances where composting yard waste is more than convenient than mulching grass clippings back into your lawn.
Composting Grass Clippings for Aesthetics
Some people prefer to bag or compost their thousand waste product for aesthetic purposes or because they practise not desire to track the clippings into their dwelling.
Simply apart from aesthetics, there are boosted disadvantages to recycling grass clippings into lawns. Yards that are overgrown or wet often leads to clumping of grass. These clumps of grass clippings, if left on the backyard, can discolor and smother your lawn.
There are a couple of remedies for this – either collect the clumps or become over the backyard once more to suspension the clumps into smaller pieces. Both can exist time-consuming.
Other things to avert with mulching lawn mowers are large quantities of leaves and weeds. Many backyard mowers (peculiarly older ones) cannot handle an abundance of leaves. If ignored, these leaves can clog motor blades and put undo strain on your mower's engine.
In addition to backlog leaves, weeds, similar dandelions, knotgrass, and crabgrass should non be mulched. Mulching returns the clippings dorsum into your backyard and in so doing y'all gamble spreading weed seeds throughout your lawn.
But for composters, dried leaves are excellent for aeration and supplying microbes with protein. And weeds are ideal green material. They break down hands in compost and microbes will consume those pesky weed seeds for you lot.
Using Grass Clippings as Compost Can Be Slap-up
Composting your grass clippings is a not bad way to recycle essential nutrients. And you'll be reducing waste that would otherwise be in a landfill.
There are a number of household foods and products which, when paired with grass clippings, volition work wonders to create rich organic compost for your lawn and garden.
The composting process can have a few weeks but the results are worth the await. Your homemade compost tin exist applied as topsoil, mulch, and plant nourishment. Every 2nd or third twelvemonth I employ compost to meridian-dress and feed my lawn after I aerate and overseed information technology in the fall.
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Source: https://lawnchick.com/grass-clippings-as-compost/
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