How To Create Your Own “Black Gold” for Your Yard and Garden

Talk to any experienced gardener and they will tell you — the easiest way to success with gardening is to have rich, healthy soil.

And the best way to enrich your soil?

Hands down, it is adding compost.

Master gardeners call compost “black gold,” because it is so valuable for increasing the fertility of the soil.

Expensive organic fertilizers and soil amendments can help improve your soil and boost growth to a certain extent. But compost adds rich microbial life and turns sterile “dirt” into rich, black soil that plants really respond to. Rich soil keeps your plants healthy and happy.

Buying compost by the bag can help improve your soil. But at $6 or more per bag, it gets expensive, fast.

And even worse, most bagged compost is made from just one material. Composted cow manure. Composted mushrooms. Composted cotton burrs. For your best results, you’ll have to buy three or four different types and mix it up.

But there’s a much easier way to generate rich, healthy black gold for your yard or garden.

And you can literally make it with free ingredients that you are probably throwing away right now!

With a compost bin, you can take all of the vegetable kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, egg shells and cardboard cartons that would otherwise go into the landfill and put them to work for free in your own yard and garden!

There are many ways to make your own compost.

Some people literally just pile up all of their grass clippings, fallen leaves and food scraps in a corner of their back yard and leave it there until it eventually turns into finished compost. This method works, but it has several disadvantages. It can take a year or more. Your city might not allow open compost piles, and your neighbors might not appreciate the way it looks (or even smells if you aren’t doing it right). And it can attract pests that consider your open compost pile to be a food source!

A regular compost bin keeps your materials enclosed.

But if you are using a traditional compost bin, how are you going to keep your materials mixed up so that they break down more effectively? You’ll have to get out your pitch fork, or shovel and painstakingly mix up the materials every few weeks to make sure that your compost is breaking down correctly.

A compost tumbler, on the other hand, lets you easily add new material and keep it all mixed up with just a few turns of the compost bin!

Compost tumblers can be extremely expensive though. Some of them literally cost as much as $500, plus shipping! 

Others are less expensive, but what they don’t tell you is that the capacity is too small! You can barely fit anything inside.

So what’s the alternative? It’s the Spin Bin compost tumbler. (affiliate link)

The Spin Bin composter was designed specifically with the homeowner in mind.

With a 60 gallon capacity, the Spin Bin is big enough for brutally effective composting. But it’s still small enough that it fits in a small area of your back yard and doesn’t cost so much to ship that it is no longer affordable.

They actually designed the product so that it fits in a small enough box to ship at a reasonable rate, making it less expensive to you because of the reduced shipping and storage costs.

Lids on both sides means that whichever side is facing up is ready to accept more materials.

Another great thing about the Spin Bin is a double mixer bar inside the bin itself. That means that every time you flip the bin over to mix up your materials, the double mixer bar mixes and aerates with every spin.

Excellent venting also allows your materials to break down into finished compost faster.

With the Spin Bin, there are many ways to approach using the compost tumbler.

If you want to keep it simple, you can just add materials as you generate them and slowly fill up the bin over weeks or months. (You’ll be amazed at how quickly materials will shrink as they decompose into compost!) As the bin approaches fullness, just stop adding materials for a few weeks and let all the most recent materials finish breaking down and you’ll have a bin of your own finished compost to add to your garden, yard, or flowers and shrubs.

Or if you prefer, you can use the batch method, where you fill up the bin all at once with a good ratio of “browns” and “greens” — carbon rich and nitrogen rich materials. The batch method done correctly can work in as few as six to eight weeks.

Stop throwing away valuable vegetable scraps and coffee grounds. It isn’t just bad for the environment — it’s bad for your own lawn and garden.

You could be making your own “black gold” instead.

You can learn more about the Spin Bin composter at Amazon.com.