Family Friday: Creating Compost

Setting up a compost area is one of our goals for this year so we were delighted to read this month’s article from Lucas Miller on composting. The tips we shared in Five Easy Steps to Reduce Food Waste (Without Going Insane) have significantly reduced the amount of food we throw away but we still toss the occasional moldy item in the trash. (I swear the back of our refrigerator is connected to a black hole.) We’ve now decided where to place our compost area; I hope this article spurs you on as well.

So you’re recycling your bottles, cans, and paper, right? I think that’s a given for our faithful readers. Hopefully, you’re not even taking the plastic bags in the first place but, if you are, you can recycle those, too.

How about composting? My wife and I have been composting off-and-on for over a decade now so I thought I’d provide some thoughts on our experiences. I’m no expert, though, so by all means feel free to contribute your own comments and tips!

In case you don’t know already, composting is just taking organic material (non-farmers, like me, stick exclusively to plant-based stuff) and allowing it to decompose somewhere on your property so that you can use it as fertilizer. I live in a warm climate (106º of warmth  today) and it seems to take at least six months for it to decompose to the point that  there aren’t any “recognizable bits.” I think it would take longer in a cold climate, right? I’m not sure that’s the sign of ready-to-use compost but that’s what I look for.

What can you compost? Fallen leaves, grass clippings, orange peels, coffee grounds, that vegan meal that went wrong, the “hairy carrots,” and the stinky-slimy spinach. We throw our eggshells in, too, but avocado pits don’t seem to break down well and you’ll have a lot of fruit flies if you throw in a bunch of banana peels.

We keep a stainless steel, lidded container on the counter and it usually fills up by the end of the day. The kids take it out after dinner and, since we adamantly avoid anything animal-based (other than the aforementioned eggshells), we have no problems with flies even though it’s about 10-15 feet from the back door. And, I assure you, there is no unpleasant odor.

Why would you compost? First, a huge amount of yard waste unnecessarily ends up in landfills. I don’t bag my grass clippings and my city offers curbside leaf pickup and composting (how cool is that?) but even with just the food waste, it’s amazing how much composting keeps us from throwing away.

Second, it will make your yard and/or garden plants do a little happy dance. We used a huge amount of compost on our wildlife garden last year and, I’m proud to say, it has grown like crazy this year. We even had our first hummingbird visitor last month! But I digress….

We took the low-budget approach with our first attempts at composting. You know–the big bin made of chicken wire and wooden stakes. That held a LOT of stuff but you’re supposed to turn it every so often (I was shooting for once a month) and it proved to be, shall we say, arduous. So arduous, I’m embarrassed to admit, that it basically never happened.

When we put our house on the market, I just took away the chicken wire and spread it all over the lawn as best I could. It wasn’t fun (or pretty).

We now use one of the compost tumblers and it has served us well. The one we use can be seen here. I’ve never ordered from this company so I can’t personally recommend them but I was amused at the embedded video. Yes, it spins and that does make it quite a bit easier but they show it spinning freely like a bicycle wheel. When it’s loaded with 50+ pounds of decaying material it WILL take some effort to turn it over! The whole “compost in two weeks” thing is optimistic, too, methinks, but I’m sure I would have better results if I gave my decaying vegetable waste a little more TLC.

My next big project is to start a vegetable garden this year (more on that later) and my currently-rotting herbaceous material is ear-marked for that. Talk about completing the cycle! I can’t wait to eat my first tomato grown from this year’s unused Jerusalem artichokes that came with last week’s CSA box (really—what WAS I supposed to do with those things??)

Anyway, give it a try. There are ways to get started that range from free to $500. Choose one that’s right for you and take the next step in recycling. And please, if you have comments fire ‘em our way!! (Anybody know anything about worm composting?)

Lucas is a professional children’s author and songwriter from Austin, Texas. Check him out at www.lucasmiller.net. He is currently working on a song about composting – we’ll let you know when the decomposing ditty is fully composed!

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