Better Than Nothing Composting

Here is the thing about composting. At its base, it is a process that doesn’t need us at all. 

There are things you can do to speed up the enterprise, improve the quality, boost the nutrient content, make the resulting material more uniform, control the smell, and deter scavengers, but a pile of stuff that used to be alive is going back into the dirt, no matter what we do or don’t do.

Essentially, traditional human-assisted composting combines nitrogen-rich materials (“greens”) with carbon-rich materials (“browns”) and keeps them damp and aerated over time. If you’re interested in trying it for yourself, there are many great resources online that can help you adapt the basic guidelines to your particular situation, especially if that situation involves apartment living. A few places to start are the home composting section at The Spruce, the Farmer’s Almanac, and the delightfully designed Can I Compost This? 

Below is the procedure I’ve evolved for composting in my backyard over the last few years. It’s not perfect and won’t work for everyone, but I hope that going through it can help remove some of the mystery and nervousness it seems like some people feel around making a pile. You can’t really hurt anything, and if you don’t need a beautifully groomed finished product, it takes very little of your time. During pile-turning weeks, I spend about half an hour total on compost management; otherwise the weekly investment is less than that. 

Perhaps take a look at this thread, if you need inspiration. The link jumps straight to the compost part, but I think all of it is great.

So, choose a suitable corner and make a heap. Kitchen waste is probably best confined to an enclosed composter, but otherwise just toss things there. Grass, pruned stems, whatever. After two or three years, you might get some compost anyway, but that's not really the point.

— Paraic O'Donnell (@paraicodonnell) February 16, 2019

The author has empowering and validating things to say about how the greatest ecological contribution we can make in our personal outdoor areas is simply to promote good old-fashioned biodiversity. If my heap does nothing else, it at least does that. 

Stage 0: House

The “greens” are the stuff that comes out of my kitchen. I’m fairly conservative about what I collect: ends, stems, cores, peels, and weird bits of any plant-based thing I’ve cut up in the course of a week’s cooking and fruit-eating, plus coffee grounds, eggshells, anything that fell off a houseplant, and a bit of sourdough discard. I don’t compost citrus or avocado peels; I read somewhere that the former repel earthworms, and the latter take a very long time to break down. No meat or dairy. 

The kitchen scraps go into a combination of wide-mouth glass jars and some flimsy off-brand plastic boxes I got from my mother, about five inches square. In a typical week I fill about three containers; I keep one on the counter whenever I’m doing something domestic and treat it like a little trash can. Occasionally I am not paying attention and crack an egg straight into the future compost, and then I feel bad.

Despite my love of jars, I must concede that the plastic boxes are slightly superior vessels for this purpose. They fit efficiently under the drawer in the refrigerator, they withstand all dropping and other abuse, and I don’t have to put my whole hand in to get all the scrap-trash back out.

Because I live in an old house in the South and have a low tolerance for smells and house-bugs, the scrap containers live in the refrigerator until the weekend, when I take them outside. 

Stages 1-2: Tumblers

To celebrate a work milestone, I bought myself a dual-chambered compost tumbler. (Some colleagues bought sports cars.) If the manufacturer would like to sponsor this website, I will be happy to name them and link to the product. Otherwise, I will say it is two separate round plastic bins styled like truck tires, suspended on a central axle and able to rotate independently of one another. Each bin has a removable cover on its opening; one says START and the other says FINISH. There are several small holes in each side, not as big around as a pencil, to let air and rain (and insects) in.

There are two primary benefits of the tumbler system:

1. Makes it easy to thoroughly mix the week’s greens and browns. Agitating a tumbler is significantly easier than mixing things with a rake or pitchfork.
2. Keeps materials that are still relatively fresh from attracting local furry scavengers.

On Saturday or Sunday, I dump the contents of the refrigerator containers into the START chamber. I then add an approximately equivalent volume of browns (for which I primarily use dead leaves, as my yard produces them in abundance) and rotate both chambers several times, slowly enough that I can hear the contents move around. 

Keeping a good balance between greens and browns is what keeps compost from smelling bad, among other benefits. I shoot for 50/50; it’s better to err on the side of too many browns. As an entry-level composter, I would refill the containers with leaves to make sure that I was getting exactly the same amount, but I have since chilled out on that. A generous double handful is close enough. Even in summer I can’t smell the tumblers unless I’m right on top of them, and then the smell is mostly just stale coffee with an undertone of turned lettuce.

A chamber is full at about the halfway point, so there’s still room for things to toss around in there. Now that I’m cooking at home so much, I fill a chamber about every other week. When START is full, I empty the FINISH bin into the inverted lid of a metal trash can. I use the trash can lid because it is already nearby, easy to rinse off with the hose, and low enough in profile to slide under the tumbler contraption. Emptying the bin requires gravity, thumping, prodding lodged clumps with a stick, and reaching in with a (gloved) hand to root out anything very stubborn. 

The emptying is not as gross as it might sound. Even at this early point, the overall impression is of muddy leaves, with some onion skins and carrot ends still recognizable. The insect life is mostly ants and gnats, and not a distressing number of either. 

I move the START cover to the now-empty bin and the FINISH cover to the one that just got full. I turn the FINISH bin about a dozen times whenever I turn the START bin (ideally every couple days, but usually just once or twice a week) but otherwise leave it alone until START gets full again.

Stage 3: Wire bin

When I empty the FINISH chamber, the contents (transported across the yard in their metal trash can lid) go into a green powder-coated steel wire bin, there to stay until they are dirt (or at least dirt-adjacent). I use a garden fork to loosen the pile all over and then mix the new additions into what’s already there to make sure that stuff that hasn’t gotten air or sunshine in a while can get both. 

One afternoon this spring a small child came charging around my fence to look for his missing dog. He stopped dead when he saw me poking at my caged plant matter with a heavy steel fork, and it is entirely possible that he now thinks witches wear pastel sun hats, plastic garden clogs, and cargo pants tucked into wool socks. (He found the dog later, in case you were worried.)

If I have material that won’t easily fit into the tumblers, I’ll add it directly to the wire bin pile as needed. Mostly I’m talking about cut flowers that have faded and corn husks. Anything that might be attractive to scavengers (notably corn cobs) I will bury under older compost.

Sometimes a seed that found itself in the pile will joyously sprout and I get the bonus fun game of transplanting it elsewhere and taking bets on what it will turn out to be.

Stage 4: Extraction

Whenever I am digging in the yard and want to break up old terrible clay with new artisanal dirt, I dip into the compost pile. Between pile-turnings, worm friends and gravity migrate more-finished compost toward the ground, so I can either scoop down until I find some good stuff or unhook one of the wire bin’s sides so that it opens like a door and I can take some from what is essentially the bottom shelf.

Things I’ve thought about doing differently

• If this project were on a budget, I would skip the tumbler and use a wire bin with a lid to keep furry scavenger friends out.
• If I had a hose that would reach the wire bin, I would water the compost once a week in dry weather. As it is, I don’t.
• When I get my basic yard soil amended well enough with the chunky compost I make now, I might buy or build a sifter to get a finer product better suited for direct planting.
• If I were to expand in future, I would start by adding one or two sections for the wire bin, so I can better separate compost by stage with less excavating or sifting. I currently don’t make nearly enough compost to justify this step, and then I would have multiple piles to turn, so this is not an expansion I’m going to rush into.
• A leaf mulcher would speed things up by preemptively breaking up the browns, but I know myself well enough to know I wouldn’t get it out and use it often enough to be worth the investment. 

Things it would have been cool to know earlier

• For best results, turn the pile every few weeks.
• Grabbing what you can with a garden fork (or your hands) and flipping it to a new spot and repeating this action around the pile totally counts as turning it. As with many things, as long as you do it consistently, you don’t have to do it perfectly.
• You will find earthworms in a container suspended six inches off the ground.
• Don’t let weeds or invasive groundcover grow into the compost pile. Turning the pile and keeping a buffer clear of plants will keep you from having to clear weeds or invasive groundcover at scale more than once.
• Really, just turn the pile.
• Earth snakes are shy and eat earthworms and insects. Therefore, they love living in compost; it is kind to warn them before you go to turn the pile.
• Peach pits might as well be made of stone.
• Herbicides you didn’t use can still end up in your compost. Stay vigilant about what you (and your neighbors) are bringing (or washing or spraying) into your yard.
• In the fall, prioritize making a hearty dead-leaf pile in an inconspicuous corner of the yard, so you can take double handfuls of presorted browns out of it all spring and summer.
• Healthy soil has so many super cool and sometimes horrifying things living in it. 
• The best thing I ever grow may be dirt, and that is fine.