Getting the right amount of water in your compost

Water is essential to the compost process in the right amount - but too much or too little has an adverse effect on composting instead.

Dryness stalls composting

The telltale signs of dryness are ants in your compost or dusting when you try to mix your wastes.

Dry waste won’t turn into compost, as the process goes dormant when your wastes aren’t wet enough.

Garden waste generally requires watering before you can begin to make compost properly. You may have to continue adding water to keep composting going in your system, especially in summer.

Water everywhere is bad news

Over-watering or adding a lot of wet wastes can cause soggy conditions in your compost system. The resulting accumulation of acids worsens the quality of the compost you produce (naturally, we don’t want acidic compost!).

You can detect this by the distinct stench of rotting waste. Sometimes, the bad smell may be faint to the human nose but can attract unwanted visitors like flies and rats.

The sogginess can be removed by adding and mixing in dry wastes like straw and sugarcane mulch.

Handle wet wastes with Bioverter

Vegetable and fruit scraps are a great example of challenging kitchen wastes due to the sheer amount of water they contain. Large amounts of them can easily over-wet everything in a compost bin or tumbler, resulting in odours or annoying pests.

If you want to get the most out of vegetable and fruit scraps, Bioverter can handle lots of them in your wastes. Its customised design also turns the released water into a useful additional product - compost juice.