Composting at Home
One of the features of our the house we moved into was it had a garden, albeit it needed a bit of work, but we didn’t mind! A few months ago Dave started reading about vegetable gardening and composting. We both got really excited and Dave made plans to eventually make us a bin, but in the mean time we had to find a counter top compost pail.
Our Compost Pail/Keeper
We spent a few weekends looking at Bed Bath and Beyond, Ikea and Amazon for compost pail with no success. Then, it was one those days when you stop looking for something and there it is. While walking in Target, we spotted a stainless steel counter-top compost keeper and immediately picked it up.
The compost pail/keeper looks really nice on our counter and with the carbon filter you can not smell anything from it. It holds quite a bit and depending on what we cook that week (family of 4) it holds almost a week’s worth of scraps (egg shells, coffee grounds, fruit stems, peels, laundry lint). After emptying it we give it a short rinse. I’ve seen some tips online where people cut a piece of cardboard or put a coffee filter in the bottom just to help get all the stuff out of the bottom.
So now that we have a compost keeper, but where do we put our scraps? We started off by using an old plastic bin with a lid, and kept in the garage to keep the animals out. It sure didn’t look that pretty in the garage. So Dave went looking online for compost bin specs.
Our Compost Bin
Dave came up with the specs for a homemade compost bin and built one over the course of a weekend. The initial size was a 4′ x 4′ x 4′ cube, but after looking at the size of it Dave cut it in half. We moved the bin to several places in the yard trying to find the right spot – can’t block the view of the stream! We finally settled on a spot close to the house in an overgrown flowerbed of lemon basil. Really, the lemon basil is in every bed in the backyard which equals more free compost material! We quickly emptied the contents from the plastic bin into our new compost bin. We turn the contents once every one to two weeks.
The Results
Since we started composing our kitchen scraps (no cooked or meat items), our trash output has been dramatically lower. It takes a lot longer to fill our 13 gallon kitchen trash can. It’s been really fun to see everything ‘break down’ in the compost bin, and we’ve started adding lawn items to the mix too. The 2′ high bin is just about full, so we may add the second half we initially cut off by using dowel rods.
Can’t wait to add all this yummy goodness to our garden eventually and get growing in the spring!
