Whether in the garden or indoors, plants should not be used for composting in your own garden once they have contracted a disease or suffered an insect infestation.
Pests such as lice, thrips, European red mites or maggots will only die when the compost reaches very high temperatures.
Composting is actually a process in which aerobic microorganisms break down biological waste. Therefore, you should give your compost pile plenty of oxygen.
Why does my compost pile stink?
Why is my compost pile full of maggots?
Why has my compost pile turned my yard into a rat playground?
Why does my compost not look as good as expected after use, and do my plants get sick and even wilt?
Organic waste and compost piles are generally harmless to human health, provided we observe the basic principle: people with mold allergies and those with weakened immune systems should be careful. This means that such people should promptly throw organic waste from the kitchen into the organic waste bin and should not make their own compost at home. For healthy people, it is safe to make compost in their own gardens.
If you have broad-leaved trees in your garden and have enough space, you should make compost from leaves in autumn.
A special type of organic waste utilization is surface composting and mulching. Instead of transporting dead plant branches or leaves to the compost pile, they are evacuated directly and evenly on site. This is very labor efficient when larger areas of land are involved, as there is no need to reuse the finished compost. The material used for surface composting is tilled beneath the soil, while the material used for mulching remains on the soil surface. For densely cultivated gardens, mulching with organic material is easier than with surface composting, which is recommended prior to the placement of a new garden.
Not all locations in the garden are suitable for making compost. If possible, the compost pile should be set up in a shady part of the garden to prevent the compost pile from dehydrating.
Extreme weather conditions can discourage composting, so the location where the compost pile is located should be surrounded by a hedge, bean stand or wall planting to prevent it from being damaged by strong winds.
If the composting material is a mixture of food waste and garden waste, there is no need to add any additives. The success of composting depends on the richness and diversity of the materials used, i.e., the materials should be coarse and fine, soft and hard.
The more diverse the mixture of organic waste, the better the decomposition process and the higher the value of the final compost pile. It is possible to either build up the compost pile layer by layer or gradually mix together the available materials on hand. The only important thing is to avoid adding large amounts of the same material to the compost pile at once, for example, adding only leaves or grass clippings.
In order to accelerate the decomposition of the starting material, we have to shred particularly hard and bulky organic waste.