Is your compost too wet or too dry?

Water is a composting necessity. Surprisingly, there is a sweet spot for composting with the right amount of moisture, where your waste is neither too dry nor too wet.

Dryness stalls composting

The telltale signs of dryness are ants in your compost or a puff of dust when you start to mix your wastes.

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

Garden waste generally requires watering before you can begin to make compost. It can lose moisture even in an enclosed compost bin, so add more water when required to keep composting going.

Swamped with water

Over-watering or adding too much wet wastes can cause soggy conditions in your compost bin. Instead of composting, your wastes rot and emit the distinctive stench. Sometimes, the bad smell may be faint to the human nose but can attract unwanted visitors like flies and rats.

Sogginess can be removed by mixing in straw, hay or dry plant matter.

Manage the water in kitchen scraps

Vegetable and fruit scraps are challenging in traditional compost bins because they readily release large amounts of water that can swamp your waste pile. Without quick corrective action, composting is disrupted and worse still, foul smell and annoying pests can follow.

A better way to handle lots of these scraps is with a kitchen composter like Bioverter. Its bespoke design allows the released water to convert into an extraordinary bonus output - compost juice, which flows into a bottom collector for easy removal. You don’t have to worry about managing water in your compost.