Doing Our Part For The Environment: Composting

Remember to enter FeeFiFoto's Fall Fame Contest. The winner's name will be drawn on September 15. Good luck!

A guy walking through a cemetery comes upon an open grave.  He's astonished to see Beethoven sitting at the bottom of the hole with an enormous musical score on his lap and a huge pink eraser in his hand.  Beethoven is busily erasing and erasing and erasing.  The guy calls down into the grave: "Hey, Beethoven!  What are you doing down there?"  And Beethoven, who evidently enjoys perfect hearing in death, looks up and replies: "Decomposing."

Let's talk about composting.

According to Wikipedia:

"Composting is the aerobic decomposition of biodegradable organic matter, producing compost. (Or in a simpler form: Composting is the decaying of food, mostly vegetables or manure.)"

Some information on why you should compost, from Grist.org:

"Q: I don't compost, instead I just throw the banana peel or apple core into the bushes. I like the thought that maybe one day my apple core will become an apple, or that my banana peel will help nourish that piece of ground/animals in the area over ending up in a landfill... But I've heard that this eco-littering isn't terribly good... Should I start to properly compost my food?

A:  Almost none of the produce you discard will sprout new life...  Any animals that eat the fruit will be scavengers who have other food sources, because no animal could build a life on waiting for banana peels...True, one alternative is to throw them in the garbage, where they will be interred for centuries... [But]if you were to compost your pits and peels, they would transform themselves into nourishing plant nutrients. Composted material isn't just more aesthetically pleasing than rotting banana peels, it has a chemical and structural difference that is beneficial to plants..."

In case you don't know anything about composting, some materials are not recommended to put in your compost pile:

From University of Maine Cooperative Extension:

"Although almost all natural, organic material will compost, you shouldn't put everything in your pile. Some wastes, such as fish scraps, bones, butter and meat, will attract pests and may smell. Other items, such as dog or cat manure, contain disease organisms that can survive the compost process and may attract other animals. Plants that are diseased or are infested with insects should not be added to your compost pile because they can cause future problems. ...

Easy to compost: seaweed, bread, coffee grounds, egg shells, pine needles, fruit peels and rinds, garden waste, grass clippings, leaves, paper, sawdust, straw, sod, tea bags, vegetables, wood ash, wood, shavings

Hard to Compost: butter, bones, cheese, chicken, fish scraps, lard, mayonnaise, meat, milk, cooking oils, peanut butter, salad dressing, sour cream, vegetable oil, wood chips

Meat scraps or fats can attract pest / scavengers like rats or raccoons"

When I lived in a house with a relatively treeless yard, I tried composting kitchen scraps and waste from the vegetable garden.  I saved food scraps in a bucket under the sink; every few days I'd take the bucket outside and empty it into the compost box.

I felt saintly.  I patted myself on the back.  I boasted.

But it was hard.  The stuff in the box had to be turned regularly with a pitchfork, and not only am I a small and delicate hothouse flower who swoons in the heat and prefers air conditioned hotels, I'm lazy and whiny, so it didn't take long before I gave up on turning the composter and concluded that the vegetable material inside could darn well break down on its own, which can take more than a year if the pile isn't turned every few days. 

I still felt sort of holy but now also frustrated that something described as being easy required manual labor.

When I moved into our current home there was no place to put a vegetable garden, but I still wanted to be smart about food waste, so I picked up a green cone composter. 

The green cone composter is made of two parts: the basket and the cone.  The basket is sunk into the ground and the cone, attached to the top of the basket, rises about three feet above ground level.   When composting above ground, either in an open compost pile or a structured composter, you can put in only vegetable waste but no meat, fat, bones or dairy.  Eggshells are okay; eggs aren't.  But with the green cone you can put in any type of decomposable waste.  Chicken bones are okay; in fact any bones are okay, except perhaps the skeletons in your closet.  Since all the waste is contained by the basket below ground level, pests and scavengers can't get to it.  The cone concentrates the sun's heat to cook down the waste into mush; liquid leaches off into the surrounding earth and insects consume the rest. 

Voila: no turning, no mixing, no emptying, no mess, lots of saintliness.

I set the cone outside the fence where it wouldn't show and every few days I'd take the bucket outside and dump food waste in the cone. 

After a couple years, however, frustrated that anyone who entered our yard through the back gate left it open, forcing me to play tag with my dogs once a week, I locked the gate and said oh well to my ambitions for saintliness because it was too much trouble to reach the cone from the other side of the yard (see above, the part about lazy and whiny).

Then Robespierre and Cleopatra became interested in recycling and one day I said: "Hey kids!  Let's put on a show!"  Or something to that effect.

Cleo's kindergarten maintained a worm composting box.  The worms lived in the dirt and the kids fed the worms banana peels.

From Offsprung.com:

"Kids love worms, and Recycleworks has found an expensive way to tap into that desire: the Educational Waste Buster, or what we know and love as a worm bin.

Why worms?
Worms break down more food garbage than can be accomplished with passive composting, and according to City Farmer, can be done inside or outside. Yeah. I suppose that’s less disgusting, than say, owning a ferret."

I briefly considered installing a worm bin in our kitchen but:  Worms.  Eew.

I announced that we were going to compost outside, after we dug up the green cone and re-situated it inside the yard for easier access (see above: lazy and whiny).

So we dislodged the cone from the basket and dug.  We dug up clean dirt with no evidence that it had ever contained anything besides dirt, except for the styrofoam tray I'd once accidentally dropped into the cone.  Then we dug a corresponding hole inside the yard in a place where the cone would get enough sunshine to facilitate the saintly composting process.  The kids dug eagerly as they argued over who'd get to dump in the first bucket and how they'd divide dumping responsibilities thereafter.  There was much negotiation over who'd carry the bucket, who'd open the cone, and who'd execute the actual dumpage.

For the first week composting went quite smoothly.  Responsibilities were divided equitably and arguing was at a minimum.

The first fissures appeared when the bucket we kept under the sink started developing an aura, shall we say.  Immediately it became my job to open it, close it, dump it and wash it.  Soon after that the green cone also began to become more, um, interesting, as fruit flies and maggots and all kinds of other little buggies took up residence to aid in the composting process.  Bingo: composting is now 100% my responsibility.  I fill the bucket, empty the bucket, wash the bucket, contend with the fruit flies, while the kids keep their distance since, apparently, they're whiny too.

And they wonder why I refuse to get them a guinea pig.

Comments

[Rita]

fee,

ummm...perhaps you should stick to politics?

lol OK - it was cute!

:-)

Rita

[Rita]

OH FOOEY. You need to delete an extra line or something. When your blog came up on my screen, it STOPPED at the punchline of your joke. I didn't even realize there was a whole thing on composting and the environment that followed!
(Insert the keyboard characters that make the "red-faced embarassed person" HERE.)

Rita