02361 Compost: Because a rind is a terrible thing to waste
The ground's generosity takes in our compost and grows beauty! Try to be more like the ground. — Rumi
If you want to grow your own food, or to help others to grow food for you, the place to start is to make compost.
The first question is — indoor or outdoor composting? If you live in an apartment, chances are your only choice is indoor unless you know someone with an outdoor compost pile that would like to have your compostables. A second possibility is to compost on a veranda, porch, or balcony. Given the circumstances, that will be more like indoor composting since you will certainly compost in a container.
If you live in a dormitory, get busy organizing a compost program for your dorm. You’ll have to get permission from your administration. If you combine this with something fun like a competition to reduce the energy and water use of dormitory buildings, your administration will sign up for the deal. After all, they have to pay someone to haul away trash and pay someone else to buy fertilizer for the grounds. If they have less stuff to haul away and less fertilizer to buy as a result of a campus composting program, then the school saves money. Composting the waste from school cafeterias would reduce maintenance expense for the school’s landscaping (no fertilizer to buy) and lower the disposal costs for their cafeteria food service. They get bragging rights about their campus-wide composting program. What is not to like about that?
Alternatively, is there a community garden in your area? Can you start a new community garden and compost pile if there isn’t one in your area?
For indoor composting, the there are three primary choices:
- indoor compost bin,
- vermicomposting,
- bokashi.
You can buy a compost bin, but it is hardly any trouble to make a compost bin. For an apartment dweller with no outside garden or yard that generates lawn waste that needs to be composted, a galvanized metal garbage can will do just fine. You could use a plastic garbage can, or plastic buckets. That involves petrochemicals which are at best nasty and at worst toxic and cancer-causing. If that’s all you’ve got handy, especially if you acquire them used, go for it. One useful possibility for apartment dwellers are the 5 gallon food grade plastic buckets that restaurants and bakeries use. They are often free for the asking, or at most can be bought for $1 or $2. It's better to use a food grade plastic bucket than to not compost.
Get two, because when one is full, you’ll have the second one to take your current compostables.
While we always start where we can and need to start, we remain aware of the need to climb up the good-better-best decision hierarchy and reach for the best decision we can make that is practical for our circumstances. Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Don't let procrastination freeze you into inactivity either.
Drill a dozen holes in the bottom of whatever container you end up with using a 3/8th inch drill bit, find a tray to stand it in, and place it on a couple of half-inch slats in the tray so it stands above the tray instead of flat on it.
You could make a 15" x 15" x 15" box from untreated half inch plywood to use as an indoor composter. Drill holes in the bottom, put slats in a tray, and sit it on the slats in the tray. If using wood, treat it inside and out with vegetable oil. It needs a lid.
Composting involves a mixture of brown and dry and wet and green materials. With indoor composting, your wet and green will be household food waste together with the occasional trimming from household container plants. You want about twice as much brown and dry as you have wet and green materials in your compost bin.
Brown and dry can be shredded paper (white paper or newsprint), shredded brown paper sacks, shredded corrugated cardboard, shredded dried leaves, dried grass, or sawdust. All the ingredients should be shredded — don’t just lay a stack of newsprint on top of your compostables. Just shred it by hand, no need for a mechanical shredder. You can pulse food scraps a couple of times in a blender. Most food scraps will already be in small bits and pieces.
Cover the base of your container with a few inches of brown and dry materials. Add your daily compostables, wet and green, and cover them with more brown and dry materials. Avoid colored inks and glossy papers, as they may have petrochemical additives that you will not want in your compost. Yes I know, many printer s are using soy-based inks At the beginning, middle, and end of filling the container, add a small amount of soil, a couple or cups, if you have access to some soil. The best additive would be some soil from underneath an outdoor compost pile. If you come across some moldy leaves in your travels out and about, bring them home and put them in the bin. This adds additional beneficial microbes to your mix. Mix the contents thoroughly every week. If it gets dry, moisten it. You don’t want it sopping wet. You don’t want it to dry out either.
If it starts to drip water into the tray, add more brown and dry materials.
If it starts to smell, add more brown and dry and mix well. Composting is an aerobic process and there should never be any disagreeable odors. If it gets too wet and compacted, anaerobic digestion sets in and that does give off disagreeable odors. Trust your nose. If it smells bad, you have a problem. Fortunately, it is an easily solved problem. Simply add more mixing of brown and dry into the compost and mix well.
It is fine to add fats, oils, and dairy to indoor composting bins. Just make sure you add sufficient brown and dry material so you don’t develop odors. Meats not-so-much with an indoor bin like this. I compost meats in my outdoor compost piles. They are considerably larger than a bucket or home-made inside composting bin.
When the container is full, start the second container. The time it takes for your bin to compost depends on what’s in the container and many other factors. It’s done when —
- the material has a fluffy appearance,
- all the structures and form of items placed in the compost are gone (in other words, you can’t tell what the ingredients were)
- it has the odor of fresh forest earth.
What would you do with compost, as a dweller in an apartment? Here are three great ideas:
You can use compost as an ingredient in your own potting soil mixes and you can fertilize your container plants with it.
Give it to someone who has a garden and make a deal to get back fresh vegetables in return during the growing season.
You could be a GUERILLA FERTILIZER! Spread your beneficial organic fertilizing material surreptitiously in public landscaping. Don’t get caught! God only knows what the penalty is for fertilizing without a license ;).
Two other methods are sometimes used with indoor composting: vermicomposting and bokashi composting.
Here is a good overview on vermicomposting:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/organic/compost.cfm
The standard text on the subject is Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhoff.
Worm composting is fun and easy and people enjoy the relationship they develop with their worms as they consume their garbage. Yes, some come to think of the worms as just another household pet, only more useful and you don't have to entertain them, take them to the vet, and their poop is immediately useful as fertilizer.
Bokashi composting uses beneficial microbes which must be added to the container for the process to work.
Wikipedia on Bokashi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compost#Bokashi_composting
The Compost Guy’s Bokashi page — http://www.compostguy.com/bokashi-resource-page/
Here is a commercial site (I have no financial interest in the site) which does a good job of explaining what it is — http://www.bokashicomposting.com/ .
Outdoor Composting
If you have room for an outdoor composting pile, here is my Easy Very Basic Outdoor Compost recipe.
Select a place for a compost pile, and dig the ground up a bit. Put down a layer of twigs and small branches, and make alternating layers of "brown and dry" materials and "green and wet" materials. The layers should be about the same thickness. Brown and dry can include leaves, shredded tree limbs and bark, newspapers (no shiny slick papers or colored inks), brown cardboard, dried grass clippings. Green and wet includes kitchen scraps, green lawn trimmings, green leaves, flowers, weeds, plants, etc. Some people say “don’t put meats or fats” in compost, presumably because they might attract small animals. I have put them in my compost for years without a problem. You want about two parts brown and dry for each one part wet and green.
Wet each layer thoroughly, and toss a shovel of soil on each layer and a couple of small branches. The point of the branches is to keep it loose. The soil inoculates the pile with composting micro organisms. If you have a friend with some compost, maybe get a little compost to sprinkle on the layers instead of the soil.
Pile it up at least 3 feet high and 3 feet wide, & leave it alone for a year. If it's a dry summer, water it so it stays damp inside (like a wrung out sponge). After about a year, rake away the leaves still on top, and inside will be a nice, rich, dark loamy compost that smells like forest dirt when you sniff it.
If you can't wait a whole year, you can make compost faster by fussing with it a bit. Every week or so go out and "turn it.” Use a pitchfork and move the compost to a different spot. Save your energy and don't move it far. Make the new pile right next to the original pile. What was "outside" on the pile is now inside, and what was inside is now on the outside.
If the compost pile starts to smell bad, something's wrong. You probably have too much "wet and green" and/or it has somehow gotten so compacted that air can't get in.
For the problem of too much wet and green, add more brown and dry.
If the pile has become compacted, stir it up a bit and add some small branches (the purpose of the branches is to keep the pile from compacting and to help air circulate).
If you dig into the pile, you will find lots of little creatures at work, rolly polies, worms, etc. That's good, because that's what's supposed to happen.
Another method of composting, which saves even more work, is to compost in place where you grow vegetables or trees or other fruit bushes. With this method, simply put down a thick layer of mulch (4-6 inches) and put your “wet and green” compost materials under/in the mulch as you produce them. I start at one end of a bed and work my way down to the other end with my kitchen scraps and etc.
There are two advantages of this method:
The gardener does not have to make a pile in one place and then move the finished compost to the place where it can be used. Instead, the compost is made in the place where you want to use it.
As a compost pile develops more nutrients — becomes more “tasty” — some nutrients wash out of the pile with rain. If you have carefully chosen the place for your compost pile, to take advantage of this fact, then that’s less of an issue. When you compost in place, all of the nutrients are available to the growing plants in your garden bed.
I’m using a combination of vermiculture with container gardening this year as an experiment. I live in a house and have quite a bit of container garden plants on the back patio. When repotting a couple of plants this year, I noticed that worms had moved in. I checked other pots and found worms. I began spreading compost materials on top of the soil, beneath the layer of mulch I always put on top of the potting mix. This is my best container garden season ever.
If you need a specific amount of compost — say eight cubic feet — to fill a series of square foot garden beds, start with three times that amount — 24 cubic feet. The rule of thumb is that finished compost equals about 1/3 of the original volume of compost materials. If you want 8 inches of growing soil in your Square Foot Garden beds, pile 24 up inches of compost materials and it will decompose down to about 8 inches.
If you want a nice garden, start with building your soil. The common practice of wrapping valuable organic materials in black plastic and burying them in landfills is a bizarre ecological and political insanity!
No chemical fertilizer has the advantages of home made compost. Compost has the added benefit of recycling your food waste, lawn & garden trimmings on site, rather than sending them off to be buried wastefully in a landfill. Composting is the beginning of a beautiful home garden.
Start your compost pile or bin this week. A rind is a terrible thing to waste!