How To: Compost

How Does Your Garden Grow?Looking for a way to reduce the amount of your life that ends up in a landfill?  Composting is one of the easiest and most tangible ways to reduce your environmental footprint.  And if that’s not enough motivation, you’ll also decrease the number of times you have to take out the trash by up to 30%!  There are a variety of quality home composters for sale on the retail market, many of which are specifically designed for indoor composting.  However, if you’re more the do-it-yourself type, just follow this easy recipe:

Ingredients:

• 1 Plastic Bin (with lid).  Surface area is more important than depth, but you’ll probably want something small enough to fit underneath your sink.
• Shredded Newspaper (no color).  Best to use a paper shredder, but hands work ok too.  About 1 Sunday New York Times worth should suffice.
• Worms!  The best worms for composting are red worms, either Eisenia foetida or Lumbricus rubellus.  Worm Mans Worm Farm will sell you 1000 worms at the reasonable rate of around $25.
• Compostables.  You can compost fruit and vegetable scraps and peels, coffee grounds, tea bags and rinsed out, crushed up egg shells.  Avoiding meats, dairy products and oily foods will help prevent against odors, flies and other pests.

Process:
Drill about 12 – 16 holes in the plastic bin, about two thirds of the way up from the bottom.  This will provide oxygen to aid in the compost process.  Some people also puncture holes in the bottom to allow for drainage, though if you're keeping this under your sink you may prefer to skip this and avoid dealing with a drainage system altogether.

Run the shredded newspaper under water until it is thoroughly soaked, then ring it out so that it is moist, but not dripping.  Spread about half of this newspaper evenly along the bottom of your bin, then dump your worms over the paper, distributing them in a similar manner.  Finally, cover your worms with the remainder of the shredded, damp newspaper.

Maintaining Your Compost:
There is very little to do to maintain a compost, though after a few months you will have a buildup of finished compost that can be used as fertilizer, and most of your original bedding (newspaper) will be gone.  The best way to replace the fertilizer with new bedding is to move all of the finished compost over to one side, then replace the bedding on the other side and begin adding compostable scraps to that side.  Gradually the worms will move from the finished compost, at which point you can remove it and dump it in your garden, your plants, or that patch of dirt outside where grass never seems to grow.

For more information on composting, check out Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhof.