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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