Adding Green and Brown Composting Ingredients

Adding assorted food materials to your compost pile is a very important requirement if you want your compost recipe to work well. Best results are obtained if
1) there is enough air to provide the oxygen necessary for the bacteria to carry out "aerobic" decomposition;
2) your compost pile is as damp as a wrung-out sponge, and
3) you have a mixture of both "brown" and "green" composting ingredients added to your compost pile.

Decomposer organisms work best with as varied a diet as you can feed them. The ingredients are all around us -almost anything that once lived is a candidate for the compost, so try for lots of variety to get a good mix of textures and plant nutrients.

In composting jargon, woody materials that are high in carbon (autumn leaves, paper, peat moss, sawdust, cornstalks, hay and straw, etc) are called "brown" composting material.

Other materials (such as garden refuse, manure, tea and coffee grounds, feathers, hair, and food scraps) which are high in nitrogen, are labeled as "green" composting material.

Some materials can actually be both: for example, fresh grass clippings are "green"; however, dried grass is "brown".

For successful results, you can use the simple rule that compost needs to be about half "brown" and half "green" by weight. Don't bother to weigh your ingredients, though - an estimate is fine.

Composting soon becomes a matter of instinct, like the cook who bakes without a recipe. If the pile doesn't heat up, you know there's not enough "green" in the mix, but if you get a smell of ammonia from your pile, you know that it needs more "brown".

Here is a short list to help you understand which foods are "green" composting material and which are "brown" composting material

GREEN Composting Materials

Algae

Bone meal

Coffee grounds

Egg shells

Feathers

Flowers

Fruit and fruit peels

Grass clippings (fresh)

Hair

Manure

Seaweed

Tea leaves

Vegetables & peelings

BROWN Composting Materials

Buckwheat hulls

Coffee filters

Corn Cobs

Cotton/wool/silk scraps

Grass clippings (dried)

Hay

Leaves (dead)

Paper

Peat Moss

Pine needles

Sawdust

Straw

Tea bags

Anything organic can, in theory, be composted -- some more easily than others. You don't need to have all of the above materials in a compost pile, but the important thing is that you do have an equal amount of green and brown composting material for best results.

The list above is far from complete, but common sense suggests you not use materials which can cause problems if added to a compost pile.