Lazy Landscaper #1: Kitchen Waste Composting is Easy!
Kids, don’t try this at home!
The purpose of this post is purely to show how utterly easy it is to compost kitchen wastes. If you want to do any kind of landscaping or gardening, or if you’re interested in recycling or self-sufficiency, now you’ll have no excuse not to just get started.
I do not recommend the technique I’m about to describe. I’ll go further: don’t do this. It does not constitute housekeeping best practice. Indeed, it wins the inaugural Bad Housekeeping Seal of Reproval, which I just made up. Just confessing to it’s totally going to blight any hope I’ve had of getting dates, at least until I get thin and rich. Which fortunately are on the agenda for summer.
So. Here’s the awful easy way to start kitchen-waste composting broken into simple steps.
Do Not Do These Things:
1) Toss fruit and vegetable detritus (no meat or fat; there’s controversy over egg shells, but for now I throw ‘em in) and coffee grounds in a plastic grocery bag in the kitchen.
2) When it gets full, starts leaking (ew!), or you just can’t stand it any longer, toss onto the back porch.
3) Begin in Fall, continue over winter.
4) Springtime: suck it up and examine all those containers o’ nastiness. Surprise!
5) You have (some) compost!
Seriously. I just did this so you don’t have to. And found that, yes indeed, a fair amount of what I’d so casually disposed of had turned into what looks and smells a good deal like good, clean dirt. And much of the rest was these big cement-hard clods which I suspect getting dampened and soaking will fix.
Before I attacked the back porch I’d checked my Rolling Composter. Today it didn’t seem to be generating its own heat but smelled nice - again, like soil. What you don’t want is for it to smell like decay or ammonia or anything else vile. And it didn’t.
Since it’s been a week I turned it. And found out that a bunch of what I had tossed in had already become fairly soil-like. Now, some actual soil had gotten in there, a bit inevitably because for my dry brown layers I was forking up (something I do often, in many contexts) weeds I’d cut down last fall and left lying about. Aside from the incidental dirt - and while some composting guides advise us to toss in some earth to sort of give the mix the idea, I tend to be more afraid our awful alkali soil will just kill that stuff dead - I also found that the undersides of a lot of the dead weed layers had turned into something suspiciously compost-like. So, hey, that went in the bin too.
But still, as they say in those Aussie dubbed 1980’s kung-fu flicks. It did seem I had more soil or compost-looking stuff in there than I started with.
I turned the heap back into the bin and set it back upright. Next I drilled some aeration holes around the top of the bin so the stuff’d get more air. Then I added the accumulated kitchen waste of ages, plus some recent wastage. Then I stuck on more dried weeds, soaked hell out of it all, and covered it back up.
Oh, and here’s what you really should do about the kitchen wastes so as not to be a revolting slob:
1) Put a bucket on the floor by the sink or food-prep area.
2) Toss your debris right in there as it’s generated.
3) At the end of each day run it out and dump it into a bigger can or bucket on the back porch, or in the back yard. If inquisitive animal friends tend to frequent your premises, some kind of lid or cover would be a good idea, here.
4) When it comes time to turn your main compost pile, add the recent waste right in!
Isn’t that simple? Not to mention, uh, nicer. That’s how I’m doing it now. Really.
There’s also vermicomposting. It turns out that isn’t something you get from becoming too friendly with Paris Hilton, regardless what it sounds like. It’s a way of using earthworms to compost kitchen waste. That’s on the list to try later.
So, I am at long last doing actual landscapy things, in the case of today while taking a break from writing. I will not feel I’ve really started, however, until I dig a hole and actually plant something in it. I’ve a couple of candidates, basically awaiting me to quit dithering about where to put them. And as I mentioned yesterday, I bought those cool weapons. So now I can’t wait to try ‘em out!
Oh - as indicated, the Rolling Composter so far seems to be working well. The one issue I foresee is that I may need either another one or two or a single much bigger container. I will, shortly, post a description of where the idea of the Rolling Composter came from and how to make one.
Tags: compost, gardening, lazy landscaper