By: Anita

Vegetable scraps often end up in your trash, but you can take those scraps and turn them into nutrient rich soil for your landscaping. Not everything you eat is appropriate for composting, but the majority of your vegetable scraps make wonderful compost. Composting is really easy. Keep a bucket in your kitchen for certain food scraps while you are preparing your meals. At the end of the day, empty the contents of that bucket into your compost pile or bin. Heat from the sun, bacteria and activity from insects break down the food scraps into rich soil over time. As you add new ingredients to your compost, stir it up to help aid the process. Oxygen is important in the growth of bacteria.

 

When you mow your lawn, gather up the grass clippings and add them to your compost pile or bin. The same is true of leaves. These make great compost. If you are comfortable with worms, smaller red worms can help the composting process. You should feed them daily by placing new scraps  on top, but they’ll do the work of breaking the material down. It’s a fun project, especially for children.

You will first need to buy a compost bin, which can sometimes be located at home improvement or gardening stores. If you cannot find a pre-made compost bin, you can easily create your own using wood, pallets, blocks of concrete, wire, and an old garbage can with ½ -inch holes poked into the bottom. This allows moisture to escape from the compost container and into the ground, but keeps small animals out of the bin.

When you have your bin, you need to begin layering it with compost. You should first place a layer of small, smooth rocks along the bottom, and then begin alternating layers of brown and green waste. Brown waste typically consists of sawdust, wood chips, dried leaves, and paper products like newspaper and coffee filters. Green waste is comprised of eggshells, tea bags, old fruits and vegetables, coffee grounds, general food wastes, and weeds. One helpful point to remember is to put soil between each layer, as this will accelerate the whole process.

Once your compost bin is done, place it a short distance away from outside patios or decks, as activities from flies can become problematic. Additionally, on hot summer days there may be mild odors from the rotting vegetation. This smell bothers some while it doesn’t influence others. Most gardeners find it easiest to place their compost bin near their garden. Once your compost bin is in place, add a layer of soil followed by a layer of material to be composted. Top this with more soil and then let nature take over. Every day or week, you’ll add new matter to be composted. As you add additional materials, take a pitchfork and mix it up to make sure oxygen is reaching the composting matter.

After beginning your home composting project, you will need to take a few steps to maintain it. Luckily, it is not difficult or high-maintenance. You simply need to continually add scraps of food or other waste like grass clippings or dried leaves. You can keep a separate container for old food waste in your kitchen, and empty it into your compost bin frequently. You also need to remember to turn the pile over at least one time per season to air it out, so that the bottom of the compost heap is now on the top. Happy composting!

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retiredcats asked:


One pile has just leaves and the other pile is enclosed in a plastic garbage pail. I cut off the bottom and drilled air holes all over the sides. In this one I put food scraps, soil, and leaves.

By: Vicki Duong

Not too many people realize it, but composting is one of the best ways to return your resources back into the earth. In a way, composting is our way of saying thank you to Mother Earth for providing us with the resources needed to feed ourselves and our families. Simply put, composting is a lot like recycling, except you don’t take your reusable goods to a recycling center, but rather you put it in a compost bin or tumbler and back into your garden.

Let’s start with a common scenario for households of two or more. In the beginning, there was food, and it was good. Fruits and vegetables were abundant, but so were the leftovers and food scraps. Instead of tossing all the food scraps into the trash where it would take up unneeded space in landfills, why not recycle it all back into the earth? Food scraps are easy enough to compost because there’s always such an abundance of it lying around, so what have you got to lose other than the scraps themselves?

Always consider what you can and cannot compost. For instance, it’s strongly advised to never, ever compost bones, meat and dairy products, fats and oils since they take too long to decompose or won’t decompose properly at all, smell really foul after half a day, and they attract all sorts of critters and wildlife. Unfortunately, not everything can be composted; I would recommend that you toss the aforementioned items in your trash and properly dispose of them. Veggie stalks, fruit rinds, apple cores and even coffee grounds are the goodies you want to compost. You wouldn’t think it, but coffee grounds are great for the composting process since they’re rich in nitrogen and aid in adding heat to your compost pile.

We know that composting is great for the earth, but why and how? Well, if you think about it, composting cuts out a lot of costs. You would be saving a lot of money on water and garbage bills just by making free natural and organic soil fertilizer for your garden and houseplants. And did I mention it would improve the vitality of your soil? By returning nutrients back into the soil that will be released over the course of a couple years, you would be maximizing the growth and health of your plants and veggies. The soil itself would also have improved aeration and drainage. And even if you’re not an avid gardener, composting takes very little of your time and like I’ve mentioned before, what have you got to lose other than your food scraps?

*Special thanks to C. Forrest McDowell, PhD and Tricia Clark-McDowell for their compost guide Home Composting Made Easy, available on Cortesia Press.