Unusual Items to Add to Compost

If your notion of composting is limited to lawn clippings, leaves, and vegetable scraps, you’re missing out on many compost ingredients that can extend your riches in the organic garden.

Help the Pile Along by Shredding and Chopping

If you compost, you’ve observed that finely chopped compost ingredients yield a finished product faster than coarse materials. This guideline is even more salient to gardeners adding unusual or unconventional ingredients to the compost bin. Chopping ingredients increases their surface area, which increases the exposure to water, air, and bacteria, hastening breakdown.

Paper Products

If you feel guilty about using disposable paper products excessively, assuage your guilt by adding these products to your compost bin. Even if you recycle your newspaper and cardboard, most communities won’t accept paper towels, tissues, or paper plates for recycling. Shred these items for faster decomposition, and add them to your compost pile.

Hair, Fur, and Lint

You can add clippings from family haircuts, as well as hair gathered from brushes, combs, and razors. Include your pet’s hair if you forgo chemical pesticides on its fur. Add lint from the dryer, but expect to see intact fuzzy remnants if you launder synthetic fabrics.

Vegetarian Pet Waste

So, you don’t have a flock of chickens, a herd of goats, or even a pet rabbit to your name. Don’t forget your child’s parakeet or iguana. Add their stale food and soiled bedding to the compost pile. Empty the gerbil shavings into the compost bin. The stagnant water you routinely remove from your aquarium is perfect to dampen the pile on occasion.

Natural Fibers

If your favorite organic cotton pajamas have seen you through your last slumber, add them to the compost pile. Moth eaten wool garments are appropriate compost ingredients as well. If you use cotton balls or cotton swabs around the house, add them to your bin. You can even add leather scraps or worn out leather gloves to the bin.

Use with Caution

Some enthusiastic organic gardeners advocate dairy products in the compost pile. You can add moldy cheese or expired milk in small amounts, but the excess protein in dairy goods can cause rancidity in a compost pile.

Grains like leftover oatmeal, bread, and pasta can go into a compost bin, but these additions can attract rodents, which may snack on your garden when they lose interest in the compost pile.

You can add tobacco products to your compost, but you do so at the risk of introducing the tobacco mosaic virus into your garden, which can infect tomatoes, peppers, and other members of the nightshade family. In fact, smokers should wash their hands before working around plants to prevent introducing this virulent disease into the garden.

Avoid Adding These to Your Compost

Keep manure from carnivorous pets, like cats and dogs, out of the bin. These manures can carry parasites that infect people. Keep meat scraps and bones out of the pile. These generate foul odors and attract vermin. Avoid composting chemically treated wood products or sawdust, as the heavy metals they contain can build up in the soil.