What is Composting?

Composting is a process during which all dead plant and animal material is decomposed (mineralised) back to carbon dioxide, water and other trace minerals (eg nitrogen, potassium, etc).

There is a lot of composting information on the web and views on composting range from

• 'Black art needing' special a recipe
• 'Leave it alone', let nature take its course
• 'It is an engineering science requiring careful control of temperature, oxygen, particle size, etc'.

Depending on a number of conditions, composting can be very fast (days) or very slow (eg thousands of years in a peat bog).

How do we unravel all this and present something that is easy to understand and supported by both practice and science. Our Q&A is built around a composting process model divided into categories and sub divided by articles (detailed questions and answers). 

A tabular summary of the process in the Process Overview article