If you’ve got lots of bulk organic matter in your garden, then hot composting is for you. It’s a great way to process large amounts of material to cycle it back into your landscape to improve soil health and ultimately, grow more food. You can watch our latest covid-19 Crisis Gardening video to see how we do it in our own garden here.
Additional hot composting resources we’ve created over time include:
- This detailed blog on hot composting for the home scale.
- Watch this other little video I did with the City of Hobart on their industrial composting facility – so good!
- And incase you haven’t seen it yet, you can download this free compost booklet we wrote for City oh Hobart with ALL KINDS OF COMPOSTING METHODS.
- And of course, you can read last week’s blog on food waste composting here.
In conclusion, compost (in its many shapes and forms) is an essential part of living a good life. Whether you’re doing it in your backyard, community space or your local Council’s facilitating it for/with you – get into it. There’s nothing more satisfying than turning all that comfrey and spoiled straw you can see below into dark brown nutritious compost for our garden!
Hi Hannah and Fam. Love the videos. You’ve inspired me to have a go at hot composting :)
Hopefully it works out. I’m a bit worried though because I used dried plane tree leaves as my carbon, which I have since learned take a long time to break down. I’m guessing that’s maybe why my compost is taking a long time to heat up?
Just wondering if you have any little tips on what I could do to make up for my plane tree leaf situation.
Keep up the great content, it’s an absolute joy :)
Hi Annie. Yes plane tree leaves take ages – for the future, it’s best to mulch them first (or at least manually chop/rip/scrunch them up). And/or blend them with other types of carbon if you can. If your pile’s not heating up currently, you might need to re-layer the whole thing and do what I said above and add a bit more nitrogen and water. Good luck!