A Gardeners Forum Forums Gardening Reference Gardening in 2006 Composting in trashbags

Can you place leaves,green junk&paper, table scraps and a shovel or two full of soil in bag and a lil water toss it about& tie it up and keep it tossed for about 2 months and make quick compost?

Sounds more like a tossed salad!
I know it works for making leaf mold. Why not give it a try? I'd leave the kitchen scraps out of it incase it gets a bit manky!

Yep, I aggree with Longy, leave out the kitchen scrap's..
Too easy to have varmits into the bag....

I take my almost finished compost, *if I need the bins* and put it in the bags, and start all new in the bin... and leave the bags to FINISH UP COMPOSTING..

And make sure it's in a DARK GARBAGE BAG...
And kept in THE SUN....

well that's an idea! i was thinking i had to wait until it was 100% done to take it out and start a new pile BUT i suppose if i wait till it is just about done like you said and use a black garbage bag i can start on the next pile faster! woohoo!!!! thanks for the idea!

I started doing that by accident one fall when I had too many leaves I'd mulched up. I thought it was too much brown to add without without having any green stuff. I figured when I started cutting grass in the spring I could add it to the bins then; but, by spring, I had leaf mold. Now I do it every fall and the plastic bags work great!

patches

so.....forgive the question- but what i sleaf mold and is that a good thing or a bad thing???

Leaf mold like what happens in the forrest/woods..
The leaves fall down on top of each other and press each layer down, and the bottom layers turns into a compost like consistancy for the roots of the trees/plants to use or utilize as food for themselves...
Thus the cycle of self feeding of trees before the invention of LIQUID FERTILIZERS....
Organic food...

Make sure your leaves are moist.. *and kept in the sunshine and the bagged sealed so more moisture can build up.. and heat up the leaves,
which will start to cook up the leaves and render them down..

It doesn't hurt to throw in a product, something called "RINGER PLUS" *which will help break down the leaves much faster and has an ingredient to start the cooking process so to speak...*

hmmm wouldn't fertilizer do the same thing as ringer plus.
My kitchen scraps are mostly coffeegrounds+filter,tea bags,eggs shells,tater peelings& dustpan dumps.I do get a few other veggie/fruits(broccoli,salad stuff,moldy bread)

I need to move my compost pile cause A tree fell in it durring Rita&I'm changeing THAT corner of the yard some as my ducks are in that area&Tex is being a bully so have a'corner' pinned for the 2 babys for now.Its actually inconvient right now as have to go in the duck area&I broke my wheel barrell.


Leaf mold builds good soil.

well thanks for the tip. my neighbor raked all her leaves out of her bushes this morning so i asked hubby to get out the mulcher/vaccuum and suck them all up for me and he's putting them in a black plastic bag as we speak! so i suppose they are already mulched i might just add a bit of water- not too much- sela it and let it sit in the garden since it's not tilled or ready for planting yet. sound good???

Njoy,

I think the garbage bags are ok for the leaf mold since making leaf mold (I'll actually have to try that method.) Making leaf mold isn't about a carbon to nitrogen ratio/hot composting. I would be concerned if you are trying to make "quick" or hot compost in a sealed garbage bag. Hot compost is an aerobic process and requires oxygen. A sealed garbage bag would run out of that before you got good compost.

I think I know where you are going though: the sealed bag keeps the moisture in, black would help keep the temps up, and a half filled bag wouldn't be all that hard to "toss" as Longy had suggested. In the end you'd have anaerobic decomposition, and I'd step back right after you opened the bag. If you waited long enough, it would turn into mush or soup depending on how much moisture was in the materials. It probably would not get hot enough to kill any seeds that were in the bag too.

Over the winter, I keep my kitchen scraps in recycled 40 lb cat litter pales. By spring, I have mush and soup. It's great for starting a new pile, but it smells bad, and I've gotten tomato and melon sprouts if I don't hot compost the material.