Okay, I’m shopping for a compost bin for the countertop and a small tumbler.
So citrus is okay for food waste?
I see that coffee grounds are ok, but I use a K-pod and the pods from Costco are in a sort of plastic like container. How would I handle those?
Is it okay for the tumbler to get wet from rain? Does it need to be in direct sun?
Those are just a few of my immediate questions.
Citrus is OK.
Plastic is not. Can you get the coffee grounds out of the pods?
I haven’t used a tumbler – I’d check whatever the manufacturer says about it. But I’d be surprised if they were fussy about either rainfall or amount of sun.
We have rolling organic debris bins. The city says we can put food scraps in them, but the raccoons say yum yum and the smell on a hot summer day is undesirable. We compost or use the disposal, and put things like avocado pits in the debris cans.
ETA: Avoid getting a countertop compost can that has a decorative indentation around the bottom–get a straight sided one. The ridge collects icky water and slime.
Let’s draw a line here between composting and making soil out of garbage. The first is mostly done with shredded tree leaves. The process is pretty much self-actuating. You can throw coffee grounds in the mix to hurry the process, but it will give you a nitrogen-rich compost.
The garbage-to-soil path requires worms. I don’t much about this side of it. For all the guidance you could ask for, go to https://www.gardensalive.com/category/you_bet_your_garden and look for “compost” and “worm tower.”
That’s one way to do it, but not the only way. And, if you’re running a hot compost pile, during part of the process it’s going to be too hot for worms.
Some things like this are compostable, but only in a commercial composting facility like in some municipalities, but not in a backyard compost pile.
We have that exact one, and it works great. When it fills up, which is frequently, we take it to a compost bin by the garden which we got for free or very cheaply from our waste disposal company. It has produced excellent compost for our garden for over 20 years.
I live in California and we have had a three bin system for as long as I’ve lived here, just over 25 years. We use our green can for grass and weeds and branches and for greasy food waste which I don’t put into the compost. (I don’t want it to smell, among other things.)
Our blue recycle receptacle is kept inside the garage door so it is easy to get to. The black trash can and the green can are on the side of the house.
The best compost of all is composted horse poop, which turned a garden full of clay into an extremely productive one.
I use the lazy method of composting. We’re on a quarter acre, and I have three sunny spots in my back yard that are next to a wall and about two feet square. I dig a hole in one of the spots, toss my (organic, non-animal) scraps in, put some dry leaves or newspaper over the layer, wet it down, and cover it with an old mat I had laying around. When I’m ready to add the next layer, I chop the last one up with a hoe and tamp it down first, and now and then, when I think about it, I’ll turn it over with a garden fork. When the spot gets full, I mix it up, cover it with dirt, and move on to the next one. By the time I’m working on the third spot, the first one is usually well broken down and ready to use. It’s not foolproof, and I’m sure it’s not as thorough nor as quick as real composting, but it does work for me!
I’ve never found that to be the case, though I’m sure my composting process isn’t optimally efficient and doesn’t produce the optimal product. But it turns garbage into sweet-smelling, nutrient-rich, soil improvement which does nice things for my garden, with very little effort on my part.
In composting as in many other things, the perfect is all too often the enemy of the good. If you get so obsessed with carrying it out in the “best” possible way that the whole process becomes a burdensome hassle, you’ll probably just give up on it.
I find a lot of worms in my mulch pile. I didn’t put them there. They just found it, and presumably they reproduce when they find a good place to live.
We tried composting for a while, but since we eat a lot of fresh vegetables, it turned out that getting adequate amounts of “brown” material was pretty hard during the winter/spring/summer, as there just weren’t that many dead leaves to rake up, and I got tired of tearing up newspapers, etc…
Our compost tumbler was pretty nasty at times as a result; the compost was good for the plants though.
Now we’ve got a sort of compost bin made of some kind of fencing wired shut into a cylinder. It’s sort of half-assedly kept now; when I remember, I save and throw vegetables on it, or get the kids to rake up dead leaves in the fall. But most of the time, I don’t bother because it’s a pain in the ass that outweighs any garden benefits.
Not every worm is welcome everywhere:
I believe in America, the further North, the more likely worms are an invasive plague. Most of Canada, I understand, used to be worm free. They went extinct during the Ice Age and the biotopes developed without them. Some species are worse than others.
We always have several compost piles working. They all start off with horse and chicken manure, then food waste, grass clippings, leaves, etc are added in layers. Eventually the material is moved to one of our planting beds.
Thats pretty interesting, and not something I considered at all when giving the advice. You are correct, it is bad to introduce species.
Altthough, just for the sake of my 5 year old son, I am totally willing to import giant 3m long Austraiian worms
Being native to Australia, though, they would probably eat him.
The Bengals suck! Boo, Cincinnati!
Oh, you didn’t want “trash talk”. Well, they did it first…
Not sure if this has been addressed -
Some products can go in either the village “recycling” bin or the village “composting” bin. Newspaper for example. (Yes we still get a Sunday paper.)
Is it preferable to put it in one over the other?
Also, if you have ANY native worms, and you put your compost where they can get to it, you WILL have plenty of worms in the compost. They breed on their own when given a rich source of food.
My compost never gets hot enough to kill pathogens (mainly rots) so I don’t generally use it in the garden – it tends to make my plants rot. I just consider it a handy way to dispose of the leaves in the fall, and the kitchen scraps the rest of the year.
I’m still fairly new to home composting, but from what I have read and learned so far, I have found it helpful to put newspaper (and brown cardboard) in my compost bin to balance out too many ‘greens’ (mostly an issue in midsummer when I try to cut our lawn once a week). As noted upthread, too much grass and other green matter can lead to making slimy green silage, rather than useful compost. Adding the right quantity (don’t ask - I just guess) of newspaper and/or cardboard can help to avoid this. And as an additional bonus, is a ‘greener’ disposal method than having a truck take it to a recycling plant. You do need to rip it into fairly small pieces for best effect, though, which is a bit time consuming.
This is the village composting and recycling program. Not a personal yard pile.
The village has a hired trash service that collects and recycles or composts at municipal scales.
I am not spending effort determining optimal green brown ratios for my own soil product creation. Just deciding which alleyway bin to toss newspapers and the ilk into.
Perhaps call the village hall and ask them what they prefer?