Black bag composting is straightforward, inexpensive, and surprisingly effective – a great way to compost when you have limited space!
Even if you live in an apartment, you can make great compost for your indoor plants.
Let me introduce you to black bag composting!
Black bag composting is simple composting in black bags. Thick black trash can liners and refuse sacks have great warmth and darkness to convert your dead leaves and home waste into the best compost for your plants.
Really? Just Black Bags?
More or less!
The beauty of black bag composting is that it’s such a simple thing!
But it is not quite as simple as just throwing in some leaves into a bag and then coming back in a couple of months to find compost, just like magic.
All composting follow a formula, simply composting in slightly different conditions does not change the formula.
Composting, at its core, occurs when carbon-rich products pair up with nitrogen-rich products, and those mix together with just a bit of moisture and sweet warmth.
Whether you have a standard compost heap in your garden, a bin for vermicomposting, or you are composting in trash cans, it is going to be essentially the same process.
So, you have thick trash can bags or refuse bags, you have a whole bunch of dead leaves that your neighbours graciously let you take with them after they raked their gardens. What else do you need?
The leaves are your carbon, but you will have to supply your own nitrogen. This is an easy enough task, a bag of nitrogen-rich pellets from your local DIY or garden shop will work fine.
Action Steps: Mix the leaves and the pellets together, add a couple of quarts of water, toss in a shovel or two of regular garden soil, and do your bag up tightly and securely with some strong cord or cable ties.
Your Own Little Ecosystem
After the bag is tied off, you can leave it alone for some time.
The actual time que from start to finish depends on one key deciding factor: if you utilize aerobic or anaerobic composting.
Black Bag Composting: Aerobic or Anaerobic?
In terms of composting methods, there are two very different schools of thought, defined by whether you choose to rely on oxygen or bacteria as the principle fuel for the composting process.
When aerobic composting with black bags, once you tie up the bag tightly and leave it to do its thing, you are not adding any more oxygen.
Turning Up the Heat
Oxygen has the potential to make composting hot.
You may have come across the term “hot composting”, and as is usually the case this happens naturally when the amounts of nitrogen, carbon and oxygen are all at their optimum ratio and all the matter is able to break down efficiently, and ultimately your composting pile is doing what it should.
Hot composting is also the best way to compost in terms of being more environmentally friendly, producing much less methane going into the atmosphere.
Because of this, and since oxygen in the compost means the decomposition process happens much quicker, people prefer to do aerobic composting using black bags.
There is nothing additional you have to do. Only holes for oxygen and at times, palpitate the bag to get some movement and spread out the oxygen.
Words of caution: In regards to hot composting, it does require larger bags, and if space is an issue, the anaerobic method may be preferred.
Keeping Your Cool
If you live in an apartment and happen to have your black bags on the balcony, then you may not want to poke holes into them because there is not a lot of chance for drainage, and you can end up making a mess!
When the bags remain tied up with no oxygen, that is the anaerobic process.
Any matter, regardless of oxygen, will eventually decompose, although its rate through the anaerobic process will be slower than the aerobic.
Instead of relying on oxygen, the composting pile relies on bacteria and moisture from the water you added when you began. It never gets hot, and continues to work good in the cooler weather.
Since the bag it tightly sealed, you will always avoid nastiness coming from the bag.
Natural healthy compost should ideally smell like dirt or earth; however, at times when the pile is chewing on some stubborn matter, it can lead you to your composting pile smelling a bit. Closed anaerobic bags ensure that you do not have any smell escaping.
The water does contain some oxygen, so it is not as though the process is occurring in a vacuum, but it can take you up to a year for those leaves to become compost!
Aerobic composting takes you about six months.
Is Black Bag Composting Just for Leaves?
No, not in the least.
Bagged leaves are an excellent source of carbon, and there are quite a few this time of year. No neighbor is likely to object to you asking for a few bags of their dead garden leaves.
(Partial aside: even if this first attempt did not create the compost you were hoping for, dead leaves will still be a good mulch to add to your garden, so don’t toss them if they didn’t break down into compost in the way you would like.)
But the beauty of composting is that it can utilize all kinds of waste that you would throw into the trash.
You can begin black bag composting with all kinds of things, including:
- Fruit and vegetable waste
- Weeds and yard waste
- Straw and hay
- Coffee grounds
- Cardboard
The combination of fresh, nitrogen-rich garden products, and dry, carbon-rich materials will ensure that your bags are productive as long as you stay with it.
What Can’t Go in the Bag?
Don’t put anything into your black composting bags that you wouldn’t put on a normal compost pile.
The following should never be composted:
- Meat or dairy
- Dog food
- Poop (other than horse manure or bunny poop)
- Grease or oils
- Yard waste treated with pesticides
- Painted wood
- Plastic
- Shiny paper or magazines
Try it Out!
Black bag composting is super simple. You just need a bag like this, and you don’t need much space, so it’s worth trying out just to find out how it works.
And don’t forget that any kind of composting is a good thing because you are recycling waste products and feeding your plants.