Hot Tips for Composting Newbs
Now that you understand how home-composting works and you’re ready to dive in, keep this list of advice handy — you’ll be glad you had some guidelines to get you started. And help out your fellow Scouts by sharing pictures of your home composting set-up through the Troop 7B Twitter and Facebook accounts! Let’s help each other to leave today better than we found it through encouragement and positive choices!
Is this your first stab at composting? Consider keeping a chart of brown and green ingredients! I’ve attached one at the bottom of this list, but there are tons of resources online.
Worried about fruit flies getting to the peels and scraps in your kitchen canister? Keep the whole canister in the freezer! This will help prevent the scraps from getting mushy or attracting bugs.
Troubleshooting bad smells:
You might think that a sealed kitchen canister will keep the smells inside, but that’s not true - a canister with air holes actually does the best job of reducing odor.
When you rinse out the canister as needed, try rubbing some vinegar around the inside of the lid and sprinkling a little baking soda in the bottom.
Or, if you don’t like the idea of rinsing out the canister, use a compostable bag! This keeps cleaning to a minimum and makes it super easy to toss the whole bag straight into the compost bin. Combine a compostable liner bag with the freezer tip to instantly move up a scout tier.
If your compost bin is getting a bad smell to it, you probably need to add more brown ingredients. Throw in a heap of leaves, newspaper, or cardboard and give things a good stir.
Maybe your dog is just having a farty night
Break up your ingredients before adding them to the compost bin. This will really speed up the decomposition process and get you from banana peels and cardboard to soil much faster. For food waste, this can mean chopping things up before adding them to the canister, or even running them through the food processor. For newspapers and cardboard, this means cutting, tearing, or shredding your material into smaller pieces.
Cardboard packaging, shipping supplies, and junk mail all make great brown ingredients. Just make sure you’re not adding plastics to the mix. Things like plasticized paper or envelopes with plastic windows are better left to the recycling bin.
The papers in the bin of your shredder are also great brown ingredients, and have the added benefit of already being shredded!
You generally want to keep meat and dairy products out of your compost. While it is possible to compost them, they can easily stink up your bin and attract unwanted animals if not tended to carefully. I recommend leaving meat and dairy out altogether for beginners.
DO NOT ADD human or animal waste. Just trust me on this. Throwing in pet litter can introduce unwanted parasites and disease, as well as stink up your beautiful soil.
If you’re adding yard clippings as brown ingredients, be aware of invasive weeds. If you pull weeds from your yard, their seeds can survive the composting process and sprout when you use the finished soil on other plants. Other yard clippings are great, but if you’re trying to rid a plant from your yard don’t add it to the soil you plan on using.
Avoid adding pesticide-treated plant trimmings to your compost bin. This isn’t typically a problem for home-composters, but those pesticides will kill the good microorganisms and stop the composting process.
Don’t worry if your compost bin is giving off a little heat. That just means you’re doing everything right and some magic is happening inside.
It’s ok if your personal green/brown ratio is different that what you’re seeing online! The volume of ingredients you need depends on how much carbon and nitrogen is in the stuff you’re using. Have fun mixing up your ratios a little to find what works best. When your compost is warm and smells earthy, you’re doing a great job.
Now that you’ve mastered these tips, what should you do with the soil you produce?
Place it on top of your flower beds or potted plants.
Start a fruit or vegetable garden! You’ll save money at the grocery store, eat well, reduce your carbon footprint, and get the satisfaction of producing some of your own food!
Gift it to a park or charity that is landscaped. Beautify a place that lots of people can enjoy.
Gift it to a grandmother or neighbor who enjoys gardening. They’ll go wild for such high-quality soil.
Start an informal business! Sell your composted soil on your neighborhood facebook page, or if you’re producing enough try striking up a deal with a local landscaper.
Do you have a great tip that I left out? Leave it in a comment below to share with the Troop!