Reduce Reuse Recycle – the saying goes. And there’s no better way to do all 3 than by creating and using your own compost. Here’s how we do it in our home.
Our compost has two stages: the kitchen compost and the garden/yard compost:
Kitchen Compost:
In the kitchen we have a small pail* with a sealed lid that we use for almost all our kitchen scraps. (By “pail” and “bucket”, incidentally, we mean a plastic coffee can, non-dairy creamer container, or Cool Whip container. You don’t have to buy anything special to put your compost in.)
- That includes: raw and cooked vegetables and fruits, all grains and carbohydrates, eggs (raw & cooked) and eggshell.
- That doesn’t include: meat, dairy, non-food items
- Coffee grounds are also compostable. However, if too much of your kitchen compost is coffee grounds, it can make your compost too acidic. How we heavy coffee drinkers do it is keep a separate bucket* (also with a lid) for our coffee grounds (biodegradable filters too) and sprinkle it into our garden & yard compost over time.
Garden & Yard Compost:
We have two garden & yard compost bins, both homemade out of little more than a couple of plastic 33 gallon trash pails.
One of our garden/yard composts produces a solid compost that looks anywhere from a rich soil to a muddy sludge. To make this compost we cut some big square vents from around the sides of a 33 gallon plastic trash can, so the compost can breathe – averting mold and mildew – and so that you can see when the compost is ready for use.
Then we put a slightly smaller can inside the bigger one. For us, this is a large plastic flowerpot with enough L-shaped “corners” of plastic around the bottom edge of the trash can so that the compost can breathe, so that resident worms can crawl up inside and help do the work of composting, and ultimately so that the finished compost can drip down from these holes into the base of the larger can.
We rest the flowerpot inside the trash can so that there’s plenty of space in the bottom for compost to fill up. Then we fill up the flowerpot with our kitchen compost. Turning it every now and then and mixing in some nearby mulch, weeds, prunings, dead grass, etc. Then we cover it with a trash can lid and wait.
When a dark brown compost begins to fill up in the bottom, we lift out the flowerpot, scoop out (or dump out) the compost and spread it in our garden beds.
