If you have been composting for a while, I’m confident you already know the organic materials that you can add to your compost however if you are a newcomer then I’m sure you’ve already done your research. Most of us tend to add things like grass clippings, leaves, food scraps, and weeds to a compost pile. How about adding a couple of unusual materials? Something that you would not find in your kitchen or your garden, like sawdust!
During this pandemic, many have taken up hobbies like cooking, gardening, composting, furniture making, and more. Many of my friends have found woodworking to be a good pastime. The feeling of putting together things and accomplishing something on your own is an excellent feeling so be it gardening or putting together your furniture it’s just amazing to have something useful to do. Now besides feeling good about the accomplishment when you work with wood you have plenty of its byproducts lying around. And as we all know that trees and plants make excellent compost, many have this question if sawdust would be good for compost.
Yes, it is an excellent ingredient to your compost pile. As we’ve been reading a lot about greens and browns now sawdust would make up for the Browns in composting materials. How does sawdust contribute to your compost? It adds carbon to the entire mixture and helps to balance all the nitrogen that you compost from the weeds in your green materials.
Now if you’re planning to utilize sawdust for your compost pile let me advise you to treat it before you can add it to the pile. You must treat it in the same manner as you work with dry leaves and add it in the same manner or ratio of 4: 1, browns to the greens accordingly.
Sawdust is an excellent addition to the compost pile adding a filter that absorbs and wicks absorbs all the water from the rain and other juices from green materials helping in the entire process of composting.
What kind of sawdust must you use? It doesn’t matter! You can utilize all kinds of sawdust because it is finally from various kinds of trees. It is absolutely good and safe to use it.
However, there is a certain thing that you must be careful about, you must make sure that the sawdust you’re about to utilize is not of wood that is chemically treated. Now in case, you’re not confident if the wood is chemically treated or not the safest thing that you could do is douse the pile of compost with water a couple of extra times, especially during summer. This process along with the regular rainfall will wash out harmful chemicals from the pile or even dilute all the chemicals that were on the sawdust.
I’ve always found sawdust to be a fantastic way for me to reclaim certain value from something that would actually end up being waste and filling up our landfills. This is a great way to utilize one hobby in order to benefit the other.
Well, that’s all for this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Hope to see you guys soon, happy composting!