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.

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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!

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