To reduce the Trash Factor in your garbage can each week, composting is an easy fix–and good for growing things in your yard! What is compost? It’s any organic material–yard waste, leftover salad, banana peels, egg shells, coffee grounds, tea bags, old newspapers. (or as Enviro Girl explains to her children, “If it grew from the earth, it can go back into the earth.) When you pile organic material up, it breaks down and once it’s broken down, it becomes a nice nutritious meal for your soil. When you add compost to soil it’s akin to feeding it vitamins. Vitamins make plants grow bigger and produce more fruit. Compost can be safely added to any soil surface, from grassy lawns to side dressing trees to layered on top of a vegetable garden.
Basically, compost works like this:
Plant matter grows–>Plant matter dies–>Plant matter decomposes–>Plant matter goes into soil–>Plant matter helps new plant matter grow–>Repeat
A good compost pile will not smell, will not attract pests (well, a few bugs, so don’t keep your pile next to the house), and likes to be moist. You can buy any number of composting accessories including bins and special pitchforks to mix your compost, but Enviro-Girl keeps it simple at her house. She has a pile near her garden kept inside a homemade frame surrounded by chicken wire. She has an ice cream bucket in the house where she tosses food waste and empties it onto the pile. She has shovels that she uses to scoop out the bottom of the pile and apply it to her gardens. Cheap and easy recycling–and slow. This lazy method of composting takes about a year from start to finish, in part because of the cold climate where Enviro Girl lives.
There are other ways to more quickly and actively change your waste into compost–compost bins speed up the process by adding HEAT and some compost bins can be turned, making your waste compost even faster. Compost bins cost anywhere from $50 to $300, depending on their size and features. You can buy a compost bin from nearly any lawn or garden care store or build your own. By storing your compost in a bin to maximize heat, turning it over a few times a week and tending to the moisture content, you can convert any kitchen waste into garden-ready compost in 3 months or less. The more you invest, the shorter the process and the more compost you can create.
The fastest way to create compost from waste is by employing worms–vermicomposting involves feeding your waste to Red Wigglers stored in bins and removing their valuable waste to reuse as fertilizer. A pound of worms will eat through 1/2 pound of kitchen waste a day, effective and oderless and requiring very little space.
One word of caution: NEVER put anything from an animal into your compost pile, that will make it stinky and attract pests. Keep your compost pile dairy and meat free. It prefers a vegan diet.
If you haven’t yet joined the Compost Club, start today–your garden will thank you because it is a healthy additive, your local landfill will thank you because you’re keeping waste out of it, and your wallet will thank you because you’ll never need to spend money on commercial fertilizers again! Composting is easy, free and will reduce your household’s trash by 1/4 or more.
Click here or here to learn more about incorporating composting into your lifestyle.
Thanks for this post, and the links, as I’ve been seriously thinking about setting up a compost pile this spring. One question, though. What do you do when it snows? Doesn’t the compost pile get buried? How do you add your scraps then? (Ok, that turned into 3 questions, sorry!)
Great questions–when you live in northern climates, your pile DOES get frozen and buried in snow, significantly slowing down the process which is why it takes me a full year to transform waste to compost using the lazy method in Wisconsin. I keep piling our kitchen scraps, etc. onto the pile regardless of the weather, spring always comes and thaws it out. It’s not pretty, but it never smells and eventually compost happens. If I used a bin, I’d probably cover it somehow just to keep it from getting frozen shut. That said, many folks living in Wisconsin are fair weather composters, which is a good start.
Here in Virginia, I have two compost bins — one that’s cooking and one that I add to year ’round. Once the first bin is ready, I empty it. Then the second bin becomes the one I don’t touch for a year, while the first bin gets filled.
- Jen/Recycla
I’ve been thinking about starting a pile at my new house this spring and had the same question. Thanks!
I’m a lazy composter, too. I throw it in the bin (made of recycled plastic), let it decompose, stir it once in a while, and eventually shovel it onto the garden. After 11 years of mixing in compost, my garden soil has improved a great deal from its former heavy-clay-laden state.