Composting
Compost Photo by Meaduva
What is composting?
At its simplest, it’s breaking down trash into fertilizer to use in your yard or garden. How it works is you put kitchen and yard waste into a container and it is broken down using various different methods, such as worms or cultures, into a final product that is rich in nutrients for plants and smaller in volume. The end product is compost which can be mixed into the soli in your garden to help enrich your plants. From garden to waste to garden it helps provide a sustainable cycle of growth.
The waste put into compost is made up of two parts commonly called brown & green. Brown has more carbon and is usually made of dry materials. Green has more nitrogen and is made up of wet materials. The proper mix, roughly half brown and half green by weight, is essential to get the compost to break down quickly, without odors, and yield a correctly balanced mix of fertilizer for the garden when the compost process is complete. The ideal mix of finished compost is roughly 25-30 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen.
Why Do it?
According to the EPA you can reduce up to 25% of your waste stream just by composting kitchen waste and yard waste instead of putting them in the trash. Most of the items that you throw away, even if they are biodegradable, don’t beak down in landfills since it’s so dense and oxygen can’t get down into the pile. The items that degrade end up releasing methane gas, due to the anaerobic process, which is a greenhouse gas and maybe just as bad or worse than C02 in contributing to global warming.
What can you compost?
Brown Items:
• Newspaper
• Sawdust
• Napkins
• Cardboard
• Paper towels
Green Items:
• Kitchen scraps (fruit, peels, vegetables)
• Coffee Grinds
• Non-diseased plant cuttings
• Hair
What’s next?
We have decided the next step in becoming green is to start composting, but we’re not sure which system we should choose. Over the next few days we’ll post about a few different systems that we’ve researched and we’re thinking about using along with the pro’s and con’s as we see them. Any ideas, thoughts or comments will greatly help us make our decision. We’ll let you know what we decide after we’ve gotten feedback and we’ll blog about our composting efforts, good and bad, throughout summer.
This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 9:10 am and is filed under Going Green. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
April 29th, 2009 at 2:55 am
I'm glad you decided to do a post on this. I have also thought about composting, and I totally should do it in Florida where the humidity breaks down things in a few days. I think all I would have to do is get some chicken wire and pile stuff up. I just need to stop being so lazy
Maybe this is a project that Angie, Erin and I can undertake after YOTG. Anyway, I'm excited to see the systems that you guys are looking into. I knew some people in VT that would compost in their apartment but you had to use worms. Its still pretty cool though!
April 29th, 2009 at 3:22 am
Hey Amy, you should be able to make some sort of pen/enclosure for the waste and then just dump it all in there whenever you have it. A corner of the yard should work pretty well. The key is to layer greens and browns and not put any protein in the pile. Protein will attract animals who will just dig things up and scatter the half composted waste around the yard. The other thing you'll want to do is turn the pile every so often to keep it composting nicely.
April 29th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Yeah, maybe this will be my project after I'm done with all these papers and finally have time for stuff. Protein shouldn't be a problem since I'm not really a meat eater anymore! Another idea would be for you and the fam to come and visit me in Florida and help me get started!
April 29th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Yes unfortunately i don't have any vacation left this year if we want to take Jake to see his grandparents at Christmas & Thanksgiving. But maybe next year we can come visit and hopefully you'll already have your composting going so i won't have to do any work
April 29th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
I'm glad to see the hair item on the list. I would have never thought of that. We should have composted in college. Our garbage mainly consisted of hair (mine and Stephanie's) and unread newspapers. I know, we were horrible!
April 29th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
Yeah I wouldn't have thought of it either, but last night on the way home I heard a story on the radio about hair mats. Which apparently are just like they sound, mats made out of human hair, that you put around your plants to prevent weeds and then they break down and provide compost. Pretty strange stuff.
Hair + newspapers + kitchen scraps and you would have been in good shape. To bad Joe's cups don't break down or you would have been set to have some pretty nice compost!
April 30th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
I could not have parted with my Joe's cups anyways!
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:05 pm
thanks !! very helpful post!
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