Tips from Olle Garden Bed: How To Make Compost From Grass Chips

It seems logical to compost with grass chips, but you really need to know something about composting lawn grass before continuing. Learn more about composting with grass chips means your overall composting will be better. The following content also has some reference value for raised garden beds.

What you need to know before composting lawn grass

Before adding the grass cuttings to the compost heap, the first thing to know is that you do not have to compost the grass cuttings. Collecting mowing compost can be a big deal. If you mow your lawn correctly, it's an unnecessary chore. Cutting the lawn at an appropriate height and frequency means that newspaper clipping will naturally decompose on your lawn without causing any harm. In fact, letting grass chips decompose naturally on the lawn will help to increase nutrients for the soil and reduce the demand for fertilizer on the lawn.

However, if you need to remove grass cuttings, you still need to know more about the process of composting with grass cuttings. Most importantly, you need to be aware that freshly cut grass is considered "green" material in the compost heap. The compost heap needs to have the right balance of green and brown materials to decompose correctly, so when you use freshly cut grass compost, you need to ensure that you also add brown, such as dry leaves. However, if you allow the swarf to dry completely before adding it to the compost heap (they will be brown), they are considered brown material.

Many people also worry about composting lawn grass treated with herbicides and how this will affect their composting. If you are composting a newspaper clipping on the lawn of your residence, the herbicides that can be legally used on your lawn must be decomposed within a few days and will not pose any further danger to other plants that receive compost made from these grass chips. However, if you use grass cuttings from non residential sites such as farms or golf courses, the herbicides used on these grass cuttings are likely to take weeks or even months to decompose, which may pose a threat to plants that receive compost from these grass cuttings.

How to Compost Grass

One might think that mowing and composting is as simple as throwing grass into the compost pile and walking away. This is not true, especially if you are talking about fresh grass dust. Because grass is a kind of green material, which often forms a mat after being cut and stacked, simply throwing grass chips into the compost pile will cause the compost pile to slow down and/or smell. This is because the grass will become compacted and excessively wet, which will prevent aeration and cause microbial death in composting.

In other words, improperly treated grass debris in the compost pile can lead to a mess of rotting and mud. On the contrary, when composting with grass chips, make sure to mix or compost the grass chips. This will help distribute the green material evenly in the pile and prevent grass from forming mats in the pile.

Composting with grass cuttings is a good way to recover the nutrients used in lawn and add green materials in urgent need to the compost heap. Now that you know how to compost grass, you can use this rich resource to help reduce the amount of landfill filling.