Making LOADS of Compost in A SMALL Garden 

"Rather than give you the food bloggers long ass history and introduction to my family, I just..." i automatically stopped watching the preview while scrolling through my feed, clicked on the video, and subscribed to the channel. Thank you for not wasting our time with information we didn't come for and don't want.

I use a large cardboard box to build my pile, then as it breaks down, i get another box and move things over into it, adding the old box as a brown material.

It’s nice to hear someone talking about small gardens with a few raised beds for veg growing rather than huge commercial growers

Hello! I'm from India. I have a tiny garden, I use my brown dry leaves, sticks, Green leaves, food scraps and kitchen waste. I collect the dry sticks , dry leaves, green leaves, in separate piles in a space hidden between my trees and garden wall. Not easily viewed. I then use either my pots or containers that I'm going to plant in or the biggest bags I get from the supermarket. The pots are easy, you have drainage holes, place the sticks at the bottom with dry leaves. Add kitchen waste , green leaves and cover with dry leaves. As you get more kitchen waste, make another layer. Keep going till you're at the top of the pot and you have no more space. Move the pot to a place that needs fertilizer, like next to a rose bush and water regularly. In a few weeks, you can begin planting in the pot. I never buy soil or fertilizer and always run out of kitchen waste!!! My garden and flowers are blooming. No turning, touching, fiddling. If you have rodents. Use a metal mesh cover for the pots and also for the bags. Bags have to be enclosed in a mesh box. I make wire mesh barrels for my bags.

So glad someone has actually said the words. There is no secret recipe to composting. I live in sub tropical Queensland Australia. I have bought multiple Gedeye Composting bins, from the Hardware stores. I literally throw in whatever i have. Seedy weeds, old hay, chook poop, etc. You can buy a huge contraption that looks like a cork screw that you can turn the compost with, whilst in the bins. I have 10 bins on the go. When one is full i leave it to cook in the sun, and fill the next one, etc. I grow great vegetables with my compost.

I liked your expression "I'm not baking a cake" about the portions of materials in the compost, really agreed. Thanks from JPN!

So refreshing to find someone succinct. Too many You Tubers waffle for 10 mins before geting to what you want...the facts.... I find lawn mowing the leaves with the grass expodites your comnpost as it will chop it up into smaller pieces.

You won me over by getting to the point my friend. Thank you for that.

I also do small scale composting. And I just use my garden to put all my kitchen waste and cardboard and I just leave it there like forever. I also like your relaxed attitude of no rules. I see too many of this big RU-vidrs rabbiting on about rules and ratios. It eventually comes out nice ❤

I live in tropical area. I have 3 thirty litres terracotta pots in my balcony. I throw in all my kitchen waste (including unwanted fish, meat parts and food leftovers, used paper bags/towels etc), vegetable and fruit waste, then cover with 1 inch of garden soil every few days to prevent any fruit flies larve from hatching. It takes about 1 month to fill up the pot. Then i move to the next pot and so on. It takes less than 2 months for the kitchen waste to fully compost if it is kept moist. The compost is filled with worms, millepedes, bettles (probably from the initial garden soil) that feeds on the kitchen waste. I never ran out of space using the 3 pots as the waste compact quite fast. I can easily add additional pots or change to bigger capacity pots if my family generate more waste in the future. There is no smell if you do not add large quantity of starchy food. If there is smell, u can get rid of the smell easily by topping up with cardboard paper, dried leaves or more compost. Once the compost is ready, leave some for covering the waste in the current pot and rest for your garden. The compost is filled with mircrobes and insects that can speed up the compost process. Generally, bettles eat meat and dead plants while worms and millepedes eats fruits and vegetables. Their population fluctuate depending on the amount of kitchen waste. If you are preparing a new pot for planting, fill the bottom with a thin layer of compost, then fill with waste and top up with 4 inches of compost. Let it rest for 2 weeks and it should be ready for planting as kitchen waste in a small pot generally do not generate alot of heat.

Very much enjoyed this video and as a fridge engineer by day the use of a fridge is very appealing. Only thing I would say is that fridges contain refrigerants that can be harmful to the environment so I would encourage getting the gas removed first, otherwise a slip of the fork could go through the evaporator. As I say this is with my refrigeration engineer hat on.

This video completely changed my perspective on composting! I never knew how possible it was to produce such a large amount of compost in a small garden. The tips and tricks were incredibly helpful, particularly the parts about optimizing for space. I can already see how applying these methods can improve the quality of my soil. Can't wait to start implementing these strategies and watch my garden thrive. You've earned a new subscriber today!

Amazing! Ive adopted this method for my allotment and it's a revelation. Gets super hot with even a small amount of material. I have quite a bit of material coming off my allotment so I only keep it in the fridge for about a month and then just add it to my pile for the worms to finish it off. Ready in two months!

I have an extremely small mainly flower garden with one 9’x4’ veg bed, plus some 30 ltr buckets for growing potatoes in. Due to lack of space last May I started to fill a 120 litre heavy duty green plastic type garden waste bag with a mixture of greens & browns mainly grass clippings, de heading of flowers, tops from potatoes etc, with cardboard broken into small pieces plus some horse bedding from a bale I purchased to add a top mulch on the potato buckets. No food waste as I did not want to attract vermin. Turning the previous layer with a hand fork every time I added a new layer. Early this month I decided to turn the whole bag into a new one and was surprised to find that at least 100 litres of the bag was perfectly usable compost, of which I have added 20 litres to each of 5 x 30 litre buckets which already contained 10 litres each of compost from this years potato harvest. Will leave them until next spring for my next planting of potatoes. This month I have emptied all the flower beds and pots of bedding plants, cut down all the dahlias to ground level , plus garden leaves and now have 2x120 litre bags full of mixed green & brown garden waste, which I will turn next spring. Have subscribed.

I just use coffee filters with used ground grounds, Bermuda grass clippings (some completely dried out, some still freshly-cut green), torn up brown paper that typically comes in Amazon packages, maybe a small bowl of vegetable/fruit scraps, and that’s it. I do it in 5 gallon buckets that I drilled holes in. I already made 4 buckets worth of compost that I started back in May, and they’re just about ready to use. I have another one that I’m currently adding. I really believe our 100° weather and my frequent mixing has helped it all decompose so fast. Since I barely use any food in my compost, it hasn’t attracted any pests nor does it stink. I always have a bucket ready to continually add to.

How REFRESHING, no long ass introduction and a small garden that ACTUALLY IS SMALL!!! Those gardens with 8+ beds may be small for the privileged in the lovely countryside but they are huge to most ordinary people in reality!!! Instantly subscribed !!!👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

18Nov2023: Wonderful, I am going outside to flip a dead mini-freezer on its side right now and start using this method. I have been You-Tubing learning about gardening for the past 2+ years and until now, I had not found a composting method that I could afford, spare my upper body arthritic joints from lifting with pitchforks, utilize adding small amounts of "browns and greens" as they become available from a one-person household and most of all, keep the composting products protected from my 4 dogs and the rabbits and coyotes that are always sniffing and digging around for food without having to build Another fenced in area on my property (20 acres in the Northern Chihuahua Desert in Luna County, New Mexico, Zone 8a/USA). I send you a giant cyber hug and kiss for offering this idea to the world. If there is anything else that I should do to the freezer besides removing the shelves and tipping it on the side so that the door sits on the top aspect of it, Please feel free to advise me. Subscribed and Thank you.

Love the lack of nonsense, so true that many of the most inspiring gardeners on here are also working on what's essentially an industrial scale compared with the average plot. The fridge idea is brilliant although I personally like the Ecomax-style bins so worms etc can gain direct access from below. You've inspired me to finally buy a cheap compost thermometer, though.

Just started composting last 2 years (belatedly in my 64th year !) in tandem with growing veg and finding it all interesting and rewarding. Annoyed with myself I never started sooner - although we have always enjoyed our small garden, growing flowers and herbs. Glad I just stumbled across your channel - enjoyed your 'realistic' small garden approach and look forward to getting tips in the future. Just to add that we have built a raised bed 10 x 6 (from scrap wood)and planted with toms and french beans(much better than runners) - also getting my head around potash - wow! - potash apparently is the derivative of Potasium. When making your own it is best to use the branches and twigs - they contain most potasium and magnesium - also getting my head around the benefits of charcoal. Interesting fact ;- Did you know that the charcoal from the Alder Buckthorn is used to make gunpowder ? Powerful stuff - and this is the species of shrub that the Brimstone butterfly live off in both caterpillar form and the flowers of this shrub feed the adult butterfly.

Watching this in August 2024, and the Huw Edwards Freudian slip made me draw on my teeth haha. Thank you so much for the rest of the video though. Xx

A fridge!! Very creative - resourceful as H. I keep a bag of collected leaves beside my five gallon bucket of food / all veg scraps & layer until it’s full. Into a little composter it goes, then the garden bed in a month or so. Love your simplicity!!

Small "guide" for composting in an even smaller garden. (I don't have a garden. It's a 12 m² terrace.) I bought a cheap plastic container with a lid and put a bit of soil in there. Everything I wanted to compost, kitchen scraps, cuttings from my vegetable plants, grass clippings I took home from work when mowing the grass there... I put in it and mix it up with the soil a bit. The soil is there to have some bacteria and fungi from the soil help break down everything. Every 2 or 3 days take off the lid and mix it up again to get fresh air in there. If it gets to dry give it some water but that should not really happen since you have a lid on the container, trapping the moisture. Since you might give it some water from time to time anyway you better have drilled some holes on the bottom for excess water to run out. Can't give a specific time to break down everything but I remember grass clippings being broken down after about a week and some times I was just digging through it to see how it looks and I couldn't find specific plant parts anymore that I remembered putting in so they had to be broken down already. Also there is much heat in there. I remember in winter on the lid was laying snow but inside the transparent plastic container weed was growing. So it was not hot enough to kill weed seeds but definately warm enough for them to grow. :D But so what? Weeds are just composting material of the future. Sadly when the wind was very strong it seriously ripped the plastic container apart so if you, like me, try it with a cheap plastic container you might want to have it somewhere protected from the wind. (Disclaimer: I am not a pro in anything. Just a guy who tried it and I thought it worked fantastically for my needs with the space I work with.)

I have a small garden but I got myself 3 chickens. I gave them an area about 2 meters by 2 meters. I throw all my leaves,cut grass and veggie scraps. The girls play in it for about 3 months. Then I have a holding area that I put that in to heat up. When I take it out I clean out the coop put it in their area and start the process over. The girls keep it aerated when they are in it. I have a third area that I hold it in till ready to use. In winter I cover all my beds in ground up leaves. The entire system works great!

Wow, what a fantastic video! For me, composting is more fun than the actual gardening. I love the science of combining greens and browns and making hot compost in less than three weeks. I use an organic version of "Drunken Composting" and can make several cubic yards of compost in 14-17 days after I mow my lawn and add the kitchen waste. My wife began adding a human-grade liquid mineral supplement to the compost. Our compost is full of earthworms.

I like that little branch chipper you are using. Never seen one that small.

I have a black plastic, compost bin ( weeds already started growing there) and two old fringes, now I know what to do with them. I think it's genius, thanks!

Great video. A couple tips - if you take your food waste, save it in a container with a lid, and once a week (give or take a few days) put it in an old blender with water (get one at a yard sale) it cuts the composting time by about 75%. Also, shredding the garden material using a bagging lawnmower eliminates the need for that really cool shredder that you have here.

Nice video. I do all kinds of composting, including vermicomposting. A great additive for all composts, especially at this time of year, is free coffee grounds from outlets like Starbucks. They bag it up, ready to collect. It a green additive, very high in Nitrogen so goes well with fallen leaves.

Thank you!! Never thought about an old fridge or maybe an extra picnic cooler!

My best advice is to simply scatter all bush trimmings and leaves evenly over your lawn, then mow it all up, the lawnmower will chop it up and mix all the materials perfectly. Much more efficient than shredding separately then manually mixing.

Huw Edwards had me cackling. Great video pal

What a straightforward and sensible approach I actually do have a small holding but love simplicity which is always a great approach to life whatever the size of the project. Thank you for your clarity it was most helpful. 🙏🤸‍♂️🧘🏻

That black compost is beautiful. 👍

Great clip! I think grass clippings is the most abundant source of green material if you want a lawn - even a small lawn. And as you say, browns can store. But the point is, you can make compost for your garden, out of your garden. This is hugely important. Going to the nursery to buy compost and soil supports an industry that mines minerals and makes anaerobic compost in an environmentally unfriendly way

Great video. I Did this for the first time last year in a large pink plastic recycling bag. The result was, to me, outstanding. I planted all my 1st earlies potatoes and several main crops in the resulting compost. 👍

LMAO ....love the intro ...subbed and i aint listened or watched anything so far past 0:18.....Every fkr on youtube needs to just say ...Im talking to my mates down the pub.

Some of my neighbours drop off their grass and hedge clippings so I get to make about three times the amount that I would manage normally. I also clear the street of leaves for leaf mulch.

OMG, I have a standup freezer that I was considering taking to the landfill until I saw this video. I live on 5 acres and have a large compost pile, but I have an area where that large freezer would be perfect!. All I have to do is pull all of the mechanical parts out of it!

I admire him for being frank about how long it takes to produce compost. Most videos on the subject claim times that can only be achieved under ideal circumstances and with a lot of effort.

Nice to know I'm not the only compost nut. 😄 I have a mid-sized garden and I built a composting frame/box out of an old shed. Everything goes in there for 6 months (with regular turning) then I transfer everything (bar the bigger stuff that needs a bit longer to rot down) into a black composting bin that really generates the heat for another 4-6 months. Add in some composting worms from time to time. Seems to work. Love the composting fridge!

Urban grower here too. I agree that is doesn’t need to be complicated or hard work. I’ve tried several lazy approaches and most work. The only difference is the length of time to compost but basically a good mix of dead matter and semi alive will compost down. I do a lot of composting in place and in pots now too.

Thanks for not giving us the long winded food blogger version

I like the use of the shredder as it begins the process much earlier without losing any of the ingredients. I like to keep mine in an old water butt with lots of holes to allow for prodding with a long shaft and loosening the mix. Forking and tossing is too laborious at my age and I like to spend my time doing more productive activities. Get it going with an activator like chicken manures, or fresh manure.

I love your commentary alongside the composting guide.

You are 101% right about using the basics to make compost,I have a chest freezer and a fridge freezer that I don't use anymore it has been made safe for me and I've been using these 2 to make beautiful compost and because of the insulation it gets hot and I have a compost within 4 months if I need it otherwise I leave it like you to stand till I need it.

New subbie here from London, now living in Yorkshire where I have inherited a lot of trees, hedges and shrubs, in a relatively small garden it's so difficult to find room for the compost, I have been using ton bags behind the greenhouse for some years and I never measured the ratios it's worked out pretty well so far, but in a small garden we can produce far more garden waste than we can store it for compost, I have just ordered 2 rolls of chicken wire 25m long x 1m, I saw someone make compost bins from it by tying it together to form a circular drum I will see how that works out but they look much tidier than the ton bags which sag as they get full and look unsightly, thanks for your video, it's rare to find videos on youtube from people with smaller gardens and where storage is a problem, now off to binge the rest of your channel :)

This is so helpful! I was looking for a way to keep my dog out of the compost without making things too difficult. I will be using the fridge method and I know just the place to get one! Sending you a huge THANKS! I was never so excited about composting until now!😂 😄😀😀😀😀🤭🤗🤓Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! DING DONG!😂

The f/f idea appeals to me not just for the heat but to keep out unwanted wildlife - some of which don't always stay wild!Really helpful video thank you.

I do gardening on a large scale, but I prefer to basically do what you do simply because it's much more handy than to have a large bin . Better to have many smaller ones than one big one that will be arduous to fill and then flip it.

Really fascinating to see you using an old fridge for a compost bin! Great idea

Brilliant, I’ve just had a freezer die on me. Loved this, thank you it’s so helpful. Composting for the small garden is a thing.

I rebuilt my compost to make two 'bins' I have a LOT of leaves every autumn, they go through the leaf hoover and get mixed with late cut grass clippings. Regular forking over and a couple of plastic drainpipes with holes in the base add O2. Add some accellerator as well.

you should get a corkscrew compost mixer, it's much easier to mix that way. I've personally increased the size of my compost bin so i upgraded to pitchfork. the right tools for the right sized compost bins makes things alot easier.

What a good idea I could collect a couple of coolers at end of summer. Also the lid will keep the neighbors from complaining. Thank you

Thanks for this video 👍 I’m fairly new to gardening, but the first thing I did when I finally had my own garden was start making compost. My initial goal was just so I could reduce waste going to landfill and recycling. It’s very not sciencey the way I did it, I just dug a little patch in the corner of my garden and added veggie scraps, coffee, shredded paper, grass, leaves etc covered it with a layer of cardboard and a brick. I poke and turn it every now and then and it’s really looking like compost! The worms are very happy. I like the idea someone said in the comment to of using a picnic cooler. I don’t have space for fridge you see, (though there are plenty about 😖) even if it only makes a small amount it’s still worth it 💚

I have roughly 120m³ of productive space & once I take out the areas where i don't apply compost, I need 2.5m³ of compost a year. This means I HAVE to source material externally. Currently I cut 300m² of lawns in two other gardens, plus their 60m of privet/cotoneaster hedges. Then there's the 250kg & more of shredded cardboard, 200kg of seaweed & anything else I can scrounge. It's all processed through 2x1m³ compost bays, one 1.2m³ bay & a smaller one for the seaweed mix (used to grow 'Jersey Royal' AKA International Kidney potatoes which taste like they did 30 years ago...). In return, I'm harvesting more than 700kg a year of organically grown produce, with my last bell peppers picked four days ago from the polytunnel. Anything & everything organic can be composted & even if the brown/green mix is out, it'll all come good in the end.

I love the no mow looking yard

I usually have problem to get enough of the brown materials while the green ones (grass clippings) are more than abundent. So I fork the pile over often to compensate for this and keep the grass composting rather than decaying. Last year I produced about 1/3 of a cubic meter of not-so-bad compost. This year I'd like to get about 1 cubic meter which would cover my garden needs. As a composter I use panels from an industrial freezer, inner space about 2m3.

Thanks for getting straight to the point.

I love your info and especially your "get over it"🙂

Thanks for the ‘Fridge’ suggestion, I’ve used plastic Daleks but they don’t keep heat in, so really like that idea

What a great idea, never thought of using an old freezer

Never thought about insulating it, great idea!

This is incredibly helpful! Thank you so much. I love the fridge idea.

Found your channel not long ago and love your videos, super relatable too cause I don’t have a massive garden to make tons of compost either.

Brilliant discussion. Perfect-sized garden for me. I grow fresh veggies & landscape on my small lot in the Midwestern USA and use a lot of compost... but mostly what I produce only. Never considered upcycling a dead freezer. I use inexpensive BLACK garbage cans with small holes drilled in it. Black retains heat, and the holes aerate. This leads to my question: Doesn't the air-tight freezer cause your compost to go anaerobic?

Great video. I have no recipe for my compost. I add everything except meats and dairy. I grind all my fruits and vegetables,eggshells, coffee grounds in the blender, and make a slurry and pour it in my compost. I grind up my leaves and grass clippings with my lawnmower. By doing this it speeds up the composting. I have three large composting bins that I can compost at varies stages.

Great idea! Next time I have a freezer or fridge that breaks, I'm repurposing it!

An old fridge! There you go, my friend :-) thanks for this great video.

Thanks for this as I am beginning to make my own compost.

Good stuff. Old gardener learned new info here. Thanks

That fridge is a very good idea

As much as I would like to hear your family story, I'm glad you went straight to the point. I really needed that information. That was the fastest subscribing I've ever done. Thanks

Appreciate you getting right to the point.

😂 your funny. I like that your stright through the point. I only have small garden

Well that was a refreshing change. Straight to the point. Thank you, from Egypt.

Yay! Thanks for just getting on to the subject :)

What a great idea. I live in a cold winter climate with a short growing season. I bought a device that dries and grinds household waste so I can add it to the garden over the winter. Compost pile (small size for just the 2 of us) won't work in the winter. Like you said, not enough mass. But an old refrigerator is a great idea! The insulation solves everything (mostly).

Put leaves in a separate pile or sacks to break down as they are broken down by fungal activity rather than in your compost bay which will be broken down by microbial activity. Then after a year you will have lovely leaf mold to use as mulch.

There is a composting method where you kind of throw everything in a container with the bottom exposed to the ground. All the worms and bugs get into the compost and do the work for you. Its very fast, you don't have to work about green vs brown material and can pretty much throw all kitchen scraps in it even ones that are usually not allowed in a compost .

Did not expect to be laughing when I clicked on this but you got me properly LOL-ing 3-4 times as I watched this. Thank you so much for the great info, would never have thought of using a fridge for this purpose, and I am a pretty clueless newb so didn't realise how vital getting the compost hot was to this whole thing... My compost is currently a sludge that is incredibly smelly and I've have a low point with it today forking half of it out the bin, trying to mix in a load of newspaper and cardboard, plopping back the stuff I took out and trying my best to mix it up as I worry about the rats that used to live in it and if they've left plague in the slime I'm mixing around. Yes at one point I stuck my hand in there because the bin is half my height and I couldn't get enough leverage to fork the stuff nearer the bottom. Sorry for the essay, I am boring everyone moaning about this today. I think this was such a refreshing video because it doesn't leave me feeling awful inadequacy with comparing my "operation" (rat-infested) with the likes of people with much bigger plots. Also a relief like a rest to the eyes and spirit, that your video didn't have that aspirational-type sheen of social media that has been wearing on me a bit lately.

I enjoyed your video. Thank you for your information. Well done!

Wow that does look amazing! Really lush!

3 minutes in and already a great video👍👏

This is brilliant thank you so much for making it really easy to understand and using normal chat love it!

My culpable crops are growing on the windowsill, it's a fun time of year 👍

I use discarded kitchen dustbins and drill holes into the sides. I can stack them, turn them without having to use a fork , abd they're always available. After they start to disintegrate, the council recycles them too!

Just do the composring pocess in tuns or planters that has drainage holes in bottom or lower sides. And add in a few worms here and there that you find in the ground which will also had in the verimcomposting prespect to it too. Love this.

Thank you for this video. I'm hobby gardener and I have small backyard space so basically I compost my food scraps in one larger bucket. It gets soggy and smelly as I don't add enough brown materials. I appreciate this video as it helped me understand. I would like to ask, since wood chips I have don;t decompose as fast, what about adding more cardboard instead? Or can I save and add walnuts shells, hazelnuts or dried chopped branches instead?

Shredding the compost before you put it in the compost bin can also speed up the process since most of it is already broken down and it'll save you space for more compost which means more heat more fresh soil and it'll be easier for the worms to digest

Great idea to use the old refrigerator!

Very helpful.

I have used all sorts of things to make compost in but never a fridge. Brilliant idea. Off I go to find myself a fridgr

I have two'-part compost piles. Fill one side, let mature while I fill the other, back and forth. Works slow but easy.

I have a broken fridge freezer, I will advertise it as a compost bin! I have a hotbin , and basically do as you do, with some material contributions from neighbours

The genius of insulation

Thank you so much for explaining it all on the smaller scale while keeping on point and not wavering off into telling us the benefits you get if we like and subscribe to your videos that almost all youtube producers do on what seems like every video perhaps not realising their redundancy. For this, and your calm voice, i liked and subscribed to your channel. Thank you again for not having blaring music drowning out your voice or jangling on at the beginning, randomly throughout and i paused to write before watching the end. I will watch your other videos. I use a coffee grinder or food processer to dessicate dehydrated banana peels and powder them along with egg shells to help thembe more readily available to the soil and the plants produced ten times as much fruit ( tomatoes) when i applied that alone to the potting mix in containers . Would breaking those down after dehidrating them crisp turn them into more brown matter in compost ? They are loaded with more calcium and potassium rather than nitrogen. Thanks again

You’re my new gardening BFF 🪴 boo.

I chuck my cardboard all food waste lawn clippings and hedge trimmings in mine and leave it for ages i try go 50/50 so I always have a stash of cardboard/waste paper ready to go in if I think it’s too wet

Absolutely class video thank you. No BS, totally realistic to the many normal ppl out there. Instant subscribe from me!