Composting

Home composting is an inexpensive, natural process that transforms your kitchen and garden waste into valuable food for your garden. Finished compost is great for using on flowerbeds, vegetable plots and for mixing into planters. It can really make your garden bloom.

By composting at home, you can reduce the amount of rubbish you put out for collection and return important nutrients and minerals to your soil. Composting is cheap, takes only a little effort and is extremely rewarding.

What to put in your home compost bin

Good things to compost include vegetable peelings, fruit waste, teabags, plant prunings and grass cuttings. These are quick to rot and provide important nitrogen and moisture.

Other things you can compost include cardboard egg boxes, scrunched up and shredded paper and fallen leaves. These are slower to rot, but provide fibre and carbon and also allow important air pockets to form in the mixture. Crushed eggshells can be included to add useful minerals. Straw and hay from rabbit, guinea pig and hamster bedding can also be added to the mix.

What not to put in your home compost bin

Certain items should never be placed in a compost bin. No cooked vegetables, no meat, no dairy products, no diseased plants and definitely no dog or cat faeces, or the waste from any other meat eating pets.

Putting these in your bin can encourage unwanted pests and can also create odour. Also avoid composting perennial weeds (such as dandelions and thistle) or weeds with seed heads.

Buy a subsidised compost bin for your garden

Since 2005 the Waste Partnership for Buckinghamshire, as part of the Home Composting Scheme, has been able to offer residents heavily subsidised compost bins.

To date, Buckinghamshire residents have bought over 30,000 bins through the scheme, which are diverting over 4,000 tonnes of waste from landfill per year. Had this waste been collected and landfilled it would have had an annual cost of nearly £400,000 to treat.

However, the Waste & Resources Action Programme, who ran the scheme in partnership with Buckinghamshire councils, have now ceased to supply us with home compost bins due to a reduction in their budget.

The Waste Partnership for Buckinghamshire now has a new scheme called Get Composting (see the website below) to replace the one run by WRAP. Please call on the following order number 0844 571 4444 and quote BBC04L.

Further help on how to compost at home

Further information on how to compost at home can be found on the Recycle for Buckinghamshire website (see the web link below).