One of the fundamental habits of Suburban Homesteading is cooking up your own compost. This sustainable practice allows you to take your scraps and turn them into excellent fertilizer for your garden. Notice, though, that I call composting a habit and not a skill. Nature composts things all on her own, folks, so you really don’t need any skill to make your own grade-A compost. You do need to develop a few new habits, though, and maybe get a little dirty.
Composting in a Suburban environment has a few unique challenges. First, there’s rarely an unseen, unused corner of the yard to devote to composting, so the appearance of the compost is of concern. Second, since we tend to live close together, then smell of the compost can become an issue. And lastly, depending on your surroundings, attracting pests is a valid concern.
When I first decided to compost, I decided that I wanted a composting container that would help control odor and repel rats. There’s a lot of good composters available, but I choose the Spinning Composter. This model is compact, made from recycled materials, and relatively attractive (or at least inconspicuous compared to some of the other models I looked at). I now have two of them sitting on the back porch right outside the kitchen door, where it’s easy for lazy me to remember to put my scraps. I also have a small ceramic crock on the kitchen counter than holds a few days worth of scraps, and this helps me to save the scraps for compost rather than just stuff them down the garbage disposal, even when I’m feeling extra specially lazy.
While I find that it takes considerably more than 30 days to cook up a good batch of compost, this may be due to my laziness because I don’t tumble the stuff daily as I should. That said, I have never been bothered by odors, and the rats have shown no interest in my lovely little porch composters. My approach also takes minimal effort, which makes me happy. The only easier way I’ve made compost was to collect autumn leaves in some big garbage bins and leave them behind the shed for two years. The compost this makes is gorgeous, but it takes a little too long to cook.
Here’s the rules I use when choosing what to put in the compost:
- IN: veggies and fruit (raw or cooked), tea bags, coffee grounds, dryer lint, brown paper bags torn into bits, egg shells, leaves, weeds without seeds, compostable packaging, and a little bit of garden soil (to inoculate the compost with good bacteria)
- DO NOT USE: animal products (except egg shells), oils, fried foods, anything in the cabbage family, pet poop, woody branches (these take to long to break down), vacuum dust (this is at Hubby’s request, because he is allergic to the pet hair, otherwise it would go in), weeds with seeds.
- Optional add ins: Worms found on rainy days, shredded newspaper, paper towels, paper coffee filters, paper napkins.
Now, this is hardly a comprehensive review of composting techniques, just an insight into my lazy method, which can be summed up as: remember to put things in the bin then let Nature do the hard work. If you want to learn a bit more and discover much more complicated techniques, I recommend these resources:
- HowToCompost.org offers comprehensive advice for composting regardless to readers of all experience levels.
- The US EPA guide to composting.
- Composting for Kids has a slide show on the basics of composting for children. My own kids LOVE to relocate found worms to the composters-I think they see them as some sort of working pet, though I have to confess, I’m not entirely sure the worms survive being tumbled for very long.
- Compost Bins is a good source of many types of composters, and they also sell rain barrels. I think I’ll have to invest in a few of those when I return from vacation.
3 comments
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June 19, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Bill Coffin
It’s worth noting that these spinning composters don’t smell at all and they turn over rather easily, even when full of material. The quality of soil they produce is amazing, too. Well worth what we spent on them. having two is nice, also, since you can stagger them and have one batch ready to go to your garden while another is breaking down.
June 19, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Chris
Compost Gold!!!
Nice overview on composting! Thank you for posting this.
You are far from lazy if you are building this composting routine in to your daily world.
I was curious about the comment on not including anything from the cabbage family…? I have not seen that in my compost reading wanderings…
I also greatly appreciate your perspective on making composting a ‘habit.’ A friend that works for a county solid waste division, is working on helping our community become aware that if a greater percentage of our population composted, this miracle of nature, there would be a million dollar annual savings habit from diverted land fill waste stream costs… And we are just a small rural community population.
Thanks,
Chris
June 19, 2009 at 6:59 pm
allisoncoffin
Thanks for the comment, Chris! I hope your friend’s compost program works out. One trick he could try is offering to give the community back the compost for free, which is much cheaper than it would cost them at the garden center. If they think they can get a future bargain by contributing to the compost program, they might be more inclined to do their part!
I don’t know for sure where I learned to not compost cabbage. I have a vague memory of reading it somewhere, and that it confirmed my own dreadful experience with rotting cabbage:
A long time ago in a job far, far away, I came into work one morning to find the whole office stinking of death. A co-worker and I traced the smell to the door of my boss’s office, but it was locked. When she didn’t arrive at work on time, we started to worry that what we were smelling was her, or at the very least some poor rodent who had managed to get into her office and die in the heating unit.
The janitorial staff came and opened the door–no dead boss–and they took hours to track the smell to her trash can (mainly because they keep leaving the room for gag breaks). Dear boss had tossed some leftover slaw in her bin the day before, and it had made the awful stink as it broke down (i.e. composted). So I don’t put that stuff or anything related to it in my compost, but in all fairness, I never really tried. Maybe broccoli wouldn’t smell of dead boss, but I don’t want it on my porch if it does!