Compost steaming on a cold morning Why buy expensive treatments or toxic fertilizers to ensure rich soil and a fertile garden when you can get the same benefits from compost. Before you go to the local nursery or garden supply store and pay a premium for composting ingredients, consider make compost on your own at home. In fact, you don’t even have to make great compost—you can find the ingredients for free with a couple of phone calls and a little research. This article serves more as a “how to” on finding free composting materials than a “how to” on making compost. The steps below will list possible ways to connect with free compost. By going through the list you are certain to find something that will amend your soil and help your plants flourish! Ask your local coffee shop if they throw out used coffee grinds. Coffee grinds are an excellent amendment to soil. Inquire with local lumberyards and home improvement stores for free sawdust. Be sure to use sawdust only from untreated wood. Collect newspapers. Separate the newspaper from the glossy inserts, and shred the paper to make it compost more quickly. Contact local dairies, feedlots, or cattle operations for composted cow manure. The ideal manure has been composting for at least 2 years. Call a local food processing plant to inquire if they have any left over organic material. Visit your local zoo and ask about retrieving compost from the exhibit animals. Place cardboard over a bed of worms to create worm castings and heavily nutritious composting materials. Visit Christmas tree lots for mulched trees; many cities and communities recycle Christmas trees, so mulch might be available from this seasonal source. Contact your city government. A few cities such as San Francisco are now offering free compost starter kits. Be neighborly. Your neighbors are bound to have a lot of potential compost. Talk to them about composting, and ask if they will save their scrap vegetables and the like for you or if you can collect their yard waste. Many municipalities now offer regular yard waste pickup; if your neighbors use this, you can simply ask them to let you collect the yard waste from their bins. Set sail for seaweed. Sea and lake vegetation is remarkably nutrient rich and makes a great addition to your compost. If you live near the ocean, you can probably collect plenty of seaweed. Hose it down thoroughly before adding it to your compost; this will remove the salt and prevent unpleasant odors. Good compost is no accident. You need to have a good balance of nitrogen and carbon, and this requires the right mix of ingredients. Check the external links and the related wikiHows for more information. Compost is just a fancy way of saying broken down organic matter. Composting materials can come from nearly any plant or animal. Avoid composting manure from carnivorous animals such as dogs and cats. Parasites and harmful bacteria may be present in such material. Compost tea, a combination of water and manure allowed to sit and “steep,” is an excellent fertilizer. Use compost tea on plants when they are young to ensure quick growth and safe eating. Be sure that your source is not contaminated with chemicals, especially if you plan to use the resulting compost in an organic garden. Do not use lawn clippings from a lawn to which pesticides or herbicides were recently applied. If you’re collecting yard waste or kitchen scraps from neighbors or local businesses, expect to sort out a lot of non-compostable material, and be prepared to properly dispose of it. While households can be a fruitful source of compost ingredients, people can be very careless about properly separating trash from compost (the same is true, of course, for recycling). You’ll get a taste of what waste management workers go through every day. Most manure needs to reach sustained temperatures of above 180 degrees Fahrenheit to fully compost. Due to the danger of E. coli and other harmful organisms, avoid using fresh manure on food crops.