Kitchen Composting

Composting may seem complicated and difficult, but it's actually quite easy to get started and keep it going. Your garden will benefit and your family will enjoy healthier, better tasting vegetables and fruit. You don't need worms or complicated composting systems to make your own healthy fertilizer at home. Here's what you need to know about composting.

What is compost?

Compost is organic material that has broken down and become a nutritionally enriched "soil". It is part of the natural cycle by which nutrients return to the soil and are reused in new plants. In short, composting is rather like Mother Nature's own recycling effort.

Composting has taken on a new glamor in these economically and environmentally challenged times, but it's certainly not a new thing. It's not even a man-made thing. Leaves have been falling off trees, decaying and becoming compost for longer than man has been on this earth.

Why compost?

Composting is a way to create your own fertilizer and soil enrichment medium for your garden. When you add compost to soil, you'll reduce and eventually eliminate the need to add chemical fertilizers to your garden. Your plants will grow faster and your vegetables will be healthier because they're pulling in the nutrients from the soil around them.

How to compost

There are nearly as many ways to compost as there are gardeners. You can go all high-tech with a store-bought compost bin, you can build your own compost bin, or you can do it the way my grandmother did in her garden - just build a compost heap. The important things to remember are to alternate layers of "green compost" - kitchen waste, grass clippings and the like - with "brown compost" - hay, straw, dried corn stalks, etc.

In Your Garden:

Start with a layer of straw about six inches deep. Then start piling up the kitchen waste and grass clippings. Every time you add veggie peelings, egg shells and the like, toss some soil over the top of it. When you've got about three inches of waste, add another layer of straw and start over. Once a week or so, dig in with a pitchfork to turn the compost and aerate it - it will compost more quickly and be less acidic that way. Your compost will be ready to use in 4-6 months.

In Your Kitchen

Use an airtight, covered barrel or bin to collect compost so you don't have to make frequent trips to the backyard. There are lots of solutions for indoor composting, but you may have to experiment a bit to find one that works for you. There are some handy instructions on how to make a kitchen composter at Apartment Therapy, or you can buy a ready made solution, like this one from Amazon:

What to compost

• vegetable peelings
• grass clippings
• coffee grounds
• egg shells
• paper
• burlap bags
• dried corn stalks (at the end of the growing season)
• dried vines and thin branches
• 150+ other items that you can compost

What not to compost

• meat and meat scraps
• fish
• bones from meat or fish
• dairy products
• human or animal feces
• chemically treated wood
• diseased plants
• weeds that you don't want to encourage