Just what is kitchen compost?
In general it is the food scraps of vegetables and fruits that you use in preparing meals in your kitchen. If you are a regular composter you will use these scraps as greens or nitrogen producers for your composting recipe.
Composting is breaking down vegetative matter. The recipe for speeding up nature demands carbons or the browns mixed with nitrogen or the greens. For high nitrogen in our recipe, from the kitchen we get peels, stalks, and leaves, and from the yard waste we get grass clippings, dead plants, and picked weeds, and some manure from non meat eating animals like chickens, cows (without madcow), and horses.
In regards to how to collect these scraps as regular routine, it really depends on how much organic kitchen compost you produce. A healthy family of 4 may produce lots of kitchen compost. Keeping a compost crock on the counter and a larger compost bucket by the garbage can makes sense. It certainly saves from hauling out the scraps to the composting bin after every meal.
We are down to the last two of us in our household. As an example, last night we had chicken, broccoli, au gratin potatoes, and a nice garden salad. What went into my countertop compost pail was broccoli stalks and the wilted rob, potato peels, lettuce core, tomato and cucumber waste, and carrot peels. No dairy, no meat or fish, and no oils or fats.
If you are using your kitchen compost for a worm compost leave out any citrus fruits and onion / garlic as the little red wigglers don’t like those. If it is a wormless compost a little citrus and onions are OK.
What else is there in kitchen compost? Tea bags, coffee grounds and filters, and washed egg shells all go in my little compost bucket. As you can see, all of these items are plant based materials and that is the determining factor. You want a vegetarian compost.
Mixing your kitchen compost with the browns or carbons like straw and leaves, and adding a little moisture to your composting bin, you now have a working compost pile and turning garbage into plant nutrients.
As you find the benefits of composting becoming real for your efforts, you’ll find there are other forms of composting that are even more productive. Worm composting creates the richest and most nutritious soil additive you can find.
Worm compost, sometimes referred to as worm castings, worm humus or worm manure, is created through vermicomposting, which is similar to plain composting, except that it uses worms in addition to microbes and bacteria to turn organic waste into a nutrient-rich fertilizer much faster.
Worm composting is a specific type of system that is also sometimes referred to as vermicomposting. This system of composting is used to covert fruit and vegetable scraps into soil that is rich and fertilized. It uses two species of worms: Red Wigglers ( Eisenia foetida ) or Red Earthworms ( Lumbricus rubellus ), which are rarely found in soil and are most happy in an environment of rotting vegetation, compost and manure piles.
Getting Started with Worm Composting
Like everything else in this life, a little planning is in order.
Things to Consider:
How much kitchen compost do I produce? Your new pets eat, when healthy and happy, about half their weight every day. If you have two pounds of healthy red wigglers you will need a pound of kitchen compost or scraps every day. Worm farmers often use a grain mix that you can buy as worm food but I’m not selling worms, I just want my worms to eat my garbage.
What kind of container or worm bin will I build or buy for my new composting effort? To start out I would suggest a RubberMaid type storage tote with lid of 20-30 gallons size. I got one at WalMart for $7.50 with a snap close lid in a 22 gal. size. Good size to start! After you find that this worm composting is for you, then you can get into worm farming with stackable worm bins and begging friends and relatives for their vegetable and fruit scraps to feed your rapidly increasing number of garbage eaters.
Where will I put my worm bin? Your new garbage eaters like it between 50 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Worm farming is an indoor and outdoor sport. If you are doing it right there is very little smell so find a spot that keeps your worms happy and productive. Since I’m in Florida my worms spend the summer indoors in the mudroom off the garage and most of the winter they are outside on the porch.
Where am I getting the worms for my new pet habitat? Easy enough to do it online. I get mine from several different suppliers like Uncle Jims Worm Farm or Garden Worms or the Worm Wrangler. They send out my worms and usually in three days my new workers are munching away in fresh bedding and the usual kitchen compost they so love.
To begin a worm compost, you will need about two pounds of worms to get started. Once you have the worms they will multiply fairly quickly. One pound of worms is capable of composting approximately half of a pound of scraps per day.
Place some bedding in the tote. The bedding can be shredded cardboard or newspaper. We have horses in the area and the stall sweepings of straw, manure, and grains work just great. You can also use leaves if you like, as well. The bedding should be moistened with water, but make sure that you only used non-chlorinated water. Make sure that you only moisten it and do not over-saturate the bedding.
Now, place the worms into the bin and cover them with organic waste. The composting worms seem to like a little sand and bagged manure on top to aid their digestion and cover it all with some more shredded cardboard to block the light.All you have to do now is to let the worms do their work.
Within three to six months you will need to move the compost to one side of the bin and add new bedding. The worms will make their way to the new bedding and you can then remove the compost and use it in your garden.
In addition to increased nutrient levels, worm castings contain millions of microbes which help break down nutrients already present in the soil into available plant forms. As the worms deposit their castings, their mucous is a beneficial component absent from compost produced by hot or cold composting. The mucous slows the release of nutrients preventing them from washing away with the first watering. Worm compost is usually too rich for use alone as a seed starter. It is useful as a top dressing and as an addition to potting mixes at a rate of one part castings to four parts mix. Your plants will love it.
So now is the time to start worm composting and you can do it.
One of the details of composting is to actually accumulate your kitchen composting materials before adding to your compost recipe. Whether it’s a big family or just one or two of you, having a handy compost pail to put all those peels, vegetable scraps, and other organic kitchen waste into, keeps your kitchen clean and sanitary.
As composting has becomes more popular, the market has produced many different styles and types of compost pails. Your kitchen compost pail can be a stainless steel compost pail, or a ceramic compost pail normally called a compost crock, to a bamboo compost pail or plastic compost bucket. They come in different sizes from a small countertop compost pail usually less than a gallon size to a large plastic compost pail of two or three gallons. I recommend that your compost pail have a good lid with carbon odor filters to keep the odors in the pail. Who needs smells and pests in their kitchen? I actually have two, a little countertop compost crock by my cutting board shaped like a penguin (looks like a big cookie jar) and a big plastic compost pail next to the kitchen garbage can that I fill with larger kitchen waste and from the penguin pail.
Remember this is for your convenience to recycle organic (meaning vegetable and fruit scraps,tea bags and coffee grounds) kitchen waste. Kitchen compost materials added to garden waste following the basic composting recipe of carbon/nitrogen and you will have the best finished compost.
In an apartment or townhouse where space is limited and yard waste is minimal use a plain old plastic bucket with a lid to collect the waste. There are grass clippings and leaves and plant cuttings that will be useful for your composting.
Your compost pails are getting full so it’s time to empty them all into your compost bin. I wash out the plastic compost pails with the hose and dry them in the sun. My little penguin compost crock gets the dishwasher treatment. My kitchen keeps clean, smelling good, and no bugs.
Compost pails are a great convenience in efforts to keep composting a routine activity in any household and the benefits of great composting will show in your gardens and in your pocketbook.
Let’s Recycle Organic Waste-Kitchen Compost and Garden Compost Together in a Composting Bin
The composting bin you decide on can be simple and cheap, to high-end style and not so cheap. It really depends on your preferences, your space requirements, and your budget. You are putting your compost pile, that ragged pile that takes a long time to decompose, into a compost container so it is not so ragged and long term in decomposition. You are helping nature along by closing in your compost and you don’t have to wait as long for your nutritious compost soil.
When aerated, kept moist, and covered, your compost is breaking down (decomposing) at about 140°-160° Fahrenheit. You have to turn it or stir it up every one or two weeks. Outside of that, there is really nothing to do. In 60- 90 days you have nutritious compost to add to your flower beds and gardens, or potted plants, or new plantings, or…….
Homemade Compost Bins
Four 5′ metal stakes, some snow fencing, and some heavy wire for attachment and with a tarp cover, you have a compost bin. Looks like crap but it certainly will get the job done.
I go down to the mower place when they get a shipment of riding lawnmowers on pallets. The guy gives me as many as I can carry away. Here I build a compost bin using 8 foot metal stakes and build the walls, top, and bottom out of the pallets. Looks neat and with good aeration, and keeping it moist, it works very well.
Now, some folks will tell you not to use untreated wood because it will also decompose. I figure “So What!”, I’ll just go down to the mower place and get another one. Isn’t that what recycling is all about? “Dust to Dust”……. and all that.
Composting Barrels
In that same recycling theme, you can use metal or plastic barrels. I particularly like those blue surplus 55 gal. plastic barrels that I get from the city and last year I got the surplus(read ugly) trash barrels from the beach authority. Cleaned up with a bunch of drilled holes and a secure lid and bingo we’ve got a compost bin.
I turn my compost weekly by simply rolling the barrel to another location in the yard. You can build a compost tumbler if you stick a steel rod through the barrel and put the ends on some sort of stanchion to create your own compost tumbler making it easier to rotate the barrel and turn your working compost. Not as much fun for the kids as rolling a barrel around the yard but if you are the only one participating in the deal a crank will be easier and quicker.
Worm Bins
When you first discover worm composting it may put you off a bit but really, get over it. They have tried softening the name to vermicomposting but “vermi” is simply latin for worm. We are not just talking any worm here but “red wiggler” worms. These redworms (Eisenia foetida) are not soil dwellers but organic waste pile residents. They make the best compost for your gardens flat out.
Since this whole exercise is to keep my new pets happy I’ll make a worm farm or at least something similar. I go to the local wine shop and liberate some of their multi-bottle wooden boxes. They are usually not finished or treated wood which is good for my worms. I find a couple that are 8 inches high and about 16×16 inches length and width. I now drill lots of 3/16th inch holes in the bottom and the lid. I’ve found some side vented plastic trays at a local nursery that have a 16×16 inch nesting ridge leaving the bottom of my box 4 inches from the bottom. This is for some really wonderful compost tea.
Add your moist bedding, a little soil or fine sand, chopped up kitchen compost materials, and your redworms and you are good to go.
There you go, all types of inexpensive composting containers you can use to build a compost system for your home. More composting ideas to help you go green and benefit.
There seems to be two major types of people I meet most often that enjoy composting.
There are the environmentalists, the “green folks”. They find composting fits with their ideals and philosophies. You know, all natural, organic, and nutritional. Not a bad motivation at all, don’t you think?
The second group are the successful organic gardeners. Lawns, flowerbeds, and that little plot of tomatoes, squash, herbs,…… the ones you like getting an invite to their barbecue next Saturday.
There is another smaller group that I fit into. Let’s call it the thrifty bunch. More bluntly it is the lazy and cheap folks that want a real benefit from their “environmental correctness”. Bottom line stuff.
Get Ready, Get Set, Get Composting!!
My first foray into composting was because I just hated hauling out bagged yard waste to the street for pick-up. You know, you have to keep bagging those grass clippings. Stop the mower, detach the bag, dump it in the plastic bag in the garbage can, reattach the catch bag, start the mower again (if it isn’t to hot), and do it all over again and again. Same thing with cutting back the landscape plants around the mansion. Bag it and haul it out to be picked up.
Well, I read a short article on composting yard waste so I started to build a compost pile. It was just an empty piece of property on the side of the garage and I dumped the twigs, grass clippings, leaves (oh, do we have leaves), flower bed trimmings and picked weeds, into a heap and called it a compost pile.
It was well over a year before this stuff decomposed enough just to be called mulch, at least at the bottom of the pile. It turned out to be pretty good organic mulch and I kept this compost heap going by just piling it on without anything else. Told you I was lazy!!
As an aside, this heap was started several years ago. I have become more sophisticated in my composting efforts over the years but I kept my compost pile going. Last year I needed the space for some other things and decided to clear the pile. I had three friends with shovels and wheel barrows show up for the bottom of the compost pile. This was good nutritional soil with it’s own worms and rich smell and hey, they are friends.
Next Step -Building a Compost Bin
I’ve learned that I can speed up nature by putting all this stuff in an aerated compost container or compost bin. I learned how to build a compost bin (used pallets and steel rods). It worked great. Keeping it moist, aerated, and turned I had a bunch of rich dark compost to add to my little piece of heaven.
Since that first bin I have used 55 gal. barrels, bought large plastic bins, used compost tumblers that made it easier to turn and aerate the working compost, and cute little pillow-like composters that you roll around in the yard (the kids loved it). They all make great compost with minimal effort.
Vermicompost (Worm Compost)
I have also gotten into worm compost. I know, a bit over the top but it makes the most nutritious and richest soil available. A little weird but wow, what results. Your flower beds and vegetable gardens will yield the most flavorful tomatoes and other vegetables and the healthiest flowers and fruit to be found. And there are extra benefits – think fishing. Again, you can make your own or buy some worm compost bins. Small footprint and very little odor allows this to be done inside or out.
Composting Kitchen Scraps
I am the household cook. If you want something done right………(I was professionally trained). In the kitchen I have a nice compost pail with lid right next to the garbage can.
It is amazing how fast this compost bucket, compost pail, or crock (whichever you call it) fills up with coffee grounds and filters, banana peels, peach skin peels, potato peels, carrot peels, broccoli stalks, green bean ends, wilted lettuce leaves and cores, washed egg shells, pineapple cores, tomato ends, tea bags and any other vegetable scraps off the cutting board or getting brown in the back of the refrigerator. (Oh, right! It doesn’t happen to you)
What Goes Where for Recycling
The garbage can only gets meat, fish, and dairy scraps, plastic packaging, styrofoam, and grease.
The recycling bin (it’s the law here) gets the glass, metal, plastic covered paper, and all the plastic.
Newspapers and unbleached paper and cardboard gets shredded and included as bedding for all the compost piles I have going.
Benefits of Composting
Well, like I said, it is easy ’cause I’m lazy. It’s cheap to do, if you know how.
The paybacks and benefits of composting are both environmental and economic.
Environmental not just as “going green”, but the real meaning of recycling. Your own little biosphere if you will. Your new soil will produce healthy, pest free plants with the nutrient rich compost you’ve created from “stuff we have”.
Economic benefits of composting come from savings on fertilizer, insecticide, soil boosters, dying plants, and that time wasted out in the yard without results. And you don’t have to haul all those bags out to the street.
There is one other benefit of composting we really shouldn’t talk about. It’s that sin of “pride”. I live in a neighborhood. I live on a sandspit called Florida. I am 600 yards to the Atlantic Ocean.
I have limited wars with insects, weeds are not quite as pervasive on my little plot, everything is blooming or green and healthy, and the whole street wants to know my secret.
Sorry guys, no secret. Just composting. Hey, it’s easy!