Gardening Is the Art. Flowers and Plants being Paint. Soil Is the Canvass
While maintaining a garden in the United Arab Emirates, a desert nation, you may enlist the assistance of professional gardening services, or you may choose to garden on your own. Although the desert might provide optimum sunlight and temperatures for many plants, cultivating in the desert can be challenging. There is insufficient rainfall, the climate is excessively hot, and the soil is often extremely sandy.
Compost is the most beneficial material available to a gardener in a desert, as an effective means of tackling all of these problems since compost may increase moisture retention, insulate plant roots, and enrich sandy soils.
Acquiring the nutrient-rich organic matter necessary for the flourishing of garden plants is as simple as learning how to compost. Compost production is not a work of genius. The only thing you need is your own garbage and food scraps.
Despite your meal preparation and efforts to reduce food waste, you will not consume banana peels or pineapple tops for sure. About 8% of greenhouse gas emissions are a result of food waste, and nearly half of all food waste happens during the “consumption stage,” which includes food service and domestic trash.
It is important to reduce the amount of food that ends up in landfills as a part of the battle against global warming. Fortunately, composting is a simple way to deal with unwanted food scraps at home. It makes no difference if your house is a spacious mansion or a cramped studio. With the advice of gardening experts associated with Sirwiss, this tutorial lays out easy procedures for transforming your food scraps into aesthetically pleasing and useful compost.
What Is Compost?
Decomposing organic materials, such as your own yard wastes, grass clippings, plant debris, vegetable scraps, and discarded food, creates a nutrient-rich soil-like mixture known as compost. Composting is based on the principle that materials and waste that would otherwise be discarded may be recycled to support plant growth, resulting in increased crop production and better blooms.
Compost is a great resource for restoring healthy soil. If healthy soil really is the secret to a flourishing garden, then compost is the gardener’s best friend. Because of its capacity to balance the soil, it has been affectionately dubbed the “great equalizer” of gardening.
Is the soil in your yard too sandy? Compost may be used to bind sand together, making it more absorbent and better able to soak up liquids. Are you having problems with the tough clay ground? By fusing to clay particles, compost creates channels through which water and nutrients may reach the plant’s roots. Compost has a ton of nutrients to provide even in wonderfully loamy soil.
Cold Composting
These techniques do not rely on heat to decompose matter. Composting is a very easy process, although it might take a considerable amount of time. The most straightforward approach to dispose of food wastes is to distribute them across garden beds. Another technique is vermiculture, in which worms consume food wastes and excrete nutrient-rich castings into the soil. Another alternative is to construct a tower in which worms consume food leftovers by digging through dirt. Dug a bucket into pre-drilled holes, buried it almost to the top of a garden bed, and filled it with leaf litter, vegetable scraps, clippings, and worms. The critters enter and exit the bucket buffet through the holes, depositing their droppings straight into the bed.
Hot Composting
Composting is accelerated by heat, and harmful microorganisms and weed seeds are eliminated in the process. Most hot composting techniques need for the pile to be continuously soaked and turned over at regular intervals.
Crank-operated tumblers are space-efficient and simple to use. Composting in open bins is simple because of the easy access to air and the ability to accommodate huge quantities of waste and scraps. As long as there are two or more bins, the composting process may go uninterrupted.
Compost that is ready to be shoveled into beds might be stored in one bin while more raw materials are being processed, or “cooked,” in a second bin. Expert gardeners constructed a keyhole-shaped raised bed with a mesh-lined access hole in the center. A hole is dug and filled with compostable material. The compost pile is not something you can just start and forget about; rather, it requires regular attention and care.
What Can Be Composted?
Almost everything organic can be broken down in a compost pile. Leaves, grass clippings, shredded newspaper, wood chips, vegetable scraps, and so on all fall into this category. Compost may be made from a wide variety of materials, not only those listed here.
1. Coffee grounds and loose tea or compostable tea bags (note that most tea bags are not fully compostable, so tear or shred them before adding to compost)
2. Dry goods (crackers, flour, spices)
3. Eggshells
4. Hair
5. Nutshells
6. Pasta (cooked or uncooked)
7. Seaweed
8. Shredded paper/newspaper
9. Cardboard (non-glossy)
10. Bedding from chicken coops
What Cannot Be Composted?
Bones, fish, meat scraps, dairy products, and oil are just few examples of animal items that should not be added to your compost pile. The only exception to this rule is eggshells, which provide calcium and biodegrade quickly. Do not put animal waste, such as that from dogs or cats (or kitty litter) to your compost pile since it may contain parasites or other unpleasant substances that will not decompose. Be sure you aren’t spraying your lawns with weed killer before gathering grass clippings from their yards. Any plants you utilize the final compost on will suffer from the chemicals’ slow decomposition.
What You Need for a Good Compost Pile
These four components are essential for a healthy compost pile:
1. Brown matter (“browns”): Carbon-rich stuff such as straw, wood chips, shredded brown cardboard, or fallen leaves.
2. Green matter (“greens”): Nitrogen-rich materials such as grass clippings, weeds, manure, or kitchen wastes are examples of green matter. The carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of greens should be about 30:1.
3. Water: Keep the pile wet at all times, particularly if you add a lot of dry leaves or hay. Normally, rainfall is sufficient to keep it moist, yet during a warm spell, you may need to spritz it with water.
4. Air: Aerobic microorganisms need oxygen to live. They are in charge of converting your yard trash into black gold.
Color isn’t always a good indicator of whether something is green or brown, so keep that in mind. While fresh grass clippings become brown when allowed to dry, they are still regarded a “green” element since they have lost just their original amount of water. Straw, on the other hand, is always classified as a “brown” since most of the plant’s nitrogen had already been used to produce protein in the seeds by the time it was harvested. Increasing the surface area available to the bacteria that decompose the organic waste is a key step in the composting process, therefore shredding woody materials and shredding cardboard are two good ways to speed up the process.
Air is vital to the composting process, so it’s important to mix the ingredients in together, and never squash them down. Many people turn their compost piles several times over the summer. Turning your compost helps speed up the process of decomposition but is not necessary as long as the pile isn’t completely compacted. It will all rot eventually!
Composting In the Desert: A one-of-a-kind Method
Each compost pile should be kept at a consistent moisture level of at least 50%, or the consistency of a wrung-out sponge. Due to the high rate of evaporation in the desert, more effort will be required to reach this level of wetness. In order to maximize the benefits of your desert compost, consider the following suggestions.
1. Put your compost pile somewhere shady.
As compared to compost piles kept in the shade, compost heaps exposed to direct sunshine will be 10 to 15 degrees hotter. Rapid evaporation at elevated temperatures poses a threat to decomposition and the bacteria that facilitate it.
2. Eliminate or reduce air leaks as much as possible.
If you live in a dry area, you should choose a container with more air openings to aerate the compost, rather than a bin designed for use in wet, damp climates. This will reduce the amount of water lost as a result of evaporation.
3. As little disruption as possible, please.
As stirring the compost accelerates aerobic decomposition, it is especially useful for gardeners who live in wetter climates. Turning your pile too often might cause it to dry up too rapidly in the desert, which can slow down the decomposition process. Aim for moderation in how often you flip and moisten your pile so that it remains at an optimal moisture level.
4. Add some dry bulk material to the mound to let it breathe.
Dry, bulk materials such as sticks, pinecones, twigs, maize stalks, and other such items help “fluff” up your pile by adding air pockets, hence improving aeration. This is in addition to the standard brown/green mix in a compost pile. Brown (carbon) material is often mixed with at least one green (nitrogen) component. (The actual carbon-to-nitrogen ratio is nearer to 20:1) Some examples of brown waste include leaves, nut shells, straw, and shredded paper. Some examples of eco-friendly items include grass clippings, used coffee grounds, leftover food, and crushed eggshells. Put around 4 inches of dry, clumpy material on top of every 6 inches of green/brown material in the desert pile. Every so often, when it becomes dry, you may replenish the water.
5. Keep the pile covered.
Putting a cover on your compost pile helps to maintain the moisture in and keep the extremes out. From the inside out, the temperature of a compost pile in the desert may reach 150 degrees Fahrenheit and stay there for many days. As soon as the weather cools down, which takes about a week or two, the pile may be flipped. To do so, you’ll need to work at elevating the bottom of the pile and bringing the sides closer to the center. After the thickening material is gone, the pile will heat up again and the process will repeat itself until all that remains is humus. The addition of an insulating layer, such as leaves, cardboard, or straw, to your pile can speed up the decomposition process. A compost container that is completely covered with a lid is still another excellent choice.
Arranging Your Pile
For desert regions, it’s ideal to use a plastic compost container with strong sides and a secure cover. In addition to preventing the entry of pests in search of nourishment, this kind also helps to maintain moisture. DIY options include drilling aeration holes in the sides of a huge plastic trash can and removing the bottom so that it may rest directly on the ground, where beneficial organisms and bacteria can flourish. Because of the requirement to include several filler components, its size should be rather substantial.
Tumbler designs are often recommended by desert gardeners because to their capacity to retain moisture and the ease with which a compost tumbler can be used to stir the pile. This tumbler diverts excess water from the compost to a rain bucket, but that water may just as easily be drained and reused in the composter, which helps save water and keep nutrients from washing away. It’s best to store it in the shade because of the heat.
Composting in the desert doesn’t have to rely on water alone. As the compost is kept wet by a constant supply of water, many desert gardeners find that using it as mulch in the garden helps in the breakdown of materials. Because of this, you should check the compost pile’s moisture level often.
Putting all of your garbage in the spaces between your flowerbeds and covering it with leaves or straw is a simple method of mulch composting. Since mulch decomposes so rapidly when wet, it may be stirred into the garden beds as soon as you water them. The optimal method would include doing both: first, storing the material in a composter to kickstart the decomposition process, and then, before it has fully decomposed into humus, applying the compost as mulch.
Thankfully, the desert composting process isn’t painful. See what works best in your microclimate by experimenting with water, shade, and the optimum carbon/nitrogen ratios.