Composting Hints
Composting hints:
We compost everything other than meat and outright garbage, really - vegetable and fruit peelings, teabags, eggshells, and the occasional fish stuff. The fish refuse gets buried really deep and covered for a few days with a board, to discourage any wildlife from digging it up. Of course we add all of our yard waste, too, except fall leaves - those get composted separately.
The key to having lots of good compost, at first, is to get in the habit of saving all those precious scraps. Not easy in our disposable society! I started off just having a slop-bag under the kitchen sink… ewwwwwww! Plus, it had a tendency to smell (especially when forgotten!), and spill, and also be difficult to get scraps into. My solution? We were given a lovely cookie jar a few years ago, and it’s sat around collecting dust as a display item because we don’t USE cookie jars. Well, a few weeks ago I pressed it into service by lining it with a plastic bag. It’s roomy, we empty it daily so it doesn’t smell, and we remember to use it because it’s pretty enough to sit right out on the shelf. Problem solved!
By the way, Starbucks will give you free coffee grounds for composting!
We try to turn the compost every few days with a shovel, and we water it very well daily, especially during the summer time when it gets very dry here.
We keep two bins working - one old, one new. The old one is last year’s, and we stopped feeding it in the fall. I covered it over with good dirt at the start of winter, and only stirred it a few times during warm weather over the course of winter. By planting time, it was ready. I’m not sure how well this would work “up north”, consult a good composting guide to see if you’d need to do something different!
When I say “Bins” that’s really a misnomer. “Heaps” is more of an apt term. When we moved in I found a big square wooden frame with a diagonal cross-bar. It’s about three and a half feet across - maybe a little bigger. Just about the right size for a nice deep compost heap.