Composting at Home — One Year Later

A couple of years ago I looked into subscribing to a composting service, but ultimately I couldn’t find enough neighbors who wanted to sign up at the same time (Compost Crew starts at $32 per month for a weekly collection service in Northern Virginia, and the price drops significantly if more people in your neighborhood sign up too).

After asking my neighbors, a few told me they just compost at home, so I decide to give it a try.

Home composting is great because it

• hugely reduces our normal trash output, which saves on fuel/emissions for transporting that food waste to the landfill
• reduces greenhouse gases produced by food waste in a landfill (a lack of oxygen when rotting causes anerobic digestion, creating methane and other gases)
• …and creates free compost that we can use in our garden, without the carbon footprint of fetching it!

How to do it

We keep this small green tub in the kitchen, which holds 1.3 gallons, which is around 5 lbs of food scraps.

We go through 2–3 of these tubs a week, which adds up to over 500 lbs of food waste per year!

The process is pretty simple: put your “green” food scraps (basically any food except bones) into your compost pile, and just add a layer of “brown” stuff on top (dry leaves is the easiest).

The “greens” provide the Nitrogen, and the “browns” provide the Carbon. There are lots of opinions on the right ratio to use, but I don’t do any measuring, I just use enough browns to completely cover the food scraps — which is important to avoid bad smells and flies.

To make this easy, I keep leaves in an an old trash can next to my composter.

What to compost

You can search online for a handy reference guide to print out and keep in your kitchen. Some guides tell you to avoid putting anything that attracts pests in your compost (e.g. diary, meat, oils, or fish), but since I use a composting bin with a lid, I do compost meat and small amounts of other pest-attracting things.

Checking in on the composting process

As the pile builds up, and the composting process starts, it will heat up. There is an optimal temperature for composting, and you can buy a cheap compost thermometer to check how your pile is doing.

The pile needs to be moist, but not soggy. If your pile is too dry, its temperature might be too low. You can troubleshoot easily by searching online. I only used my thermometer a couple of times to spot check that things were going okay.

Saving your browns

I have two old trash cans that I use to keep my dry leaves in for my “browns”. In the Fall I get vast amounts of leaves, but by the Spring I run out and start using the leaves from our Magnolia, which drop all year.

For a more efficient compost pile, you can use a string trimmer/weed whacker to shred/mulch your leaves. This also helps you store more material. However, I’ve found it a bit of a hassle to use a string trimmer for this: it’s noisy, messy and time consuming. I plan to do less of this, or maybe resurrect my leaf mulcher.

Cleaning your in-house compost bin

When I first started, each time I emptied the inside compost bin into the pile, I would rinse it and clean it in our kitchen sink. After a while somebody gave me a tip to use newspaper to line it, as this reduces the cleaning effort. The newspaper also acts as a “brown”. :-)

There’s probably a better origami way to do this, but I found that two pages (or one folded sheet) of a broadsheet newspaper work well.

If you tear it the right width for the inside bin, you’ll be left with two pieces that fit one side, and two pieces that fit the other side. I overlap the paper on the top edge of the tub so that it can be held in place by the lid.

My inside compost bin has this bag holder sleeve that helps hold the newspaper in place.

I haven’t tried the compostable bags, as I would want to check that they break down quickly enough in a home composter.

Using the compost

After ~9 months (Summer -> Spring), my compost was looking and smelling pretty good. The Magnolia leaves are thick and don’t decompose well (I mulching any of the leaves in this first batch), so you can see they are still pretty chunky here. The food stuffs are all gone though. I had stopped adding to this pile a few months before harvesting it. (This photo was after I had emptied about half of the compost, so there was a lot more than this.)

To use the compost, I moved the top ~6 inches of material in our raised vegetable bed to the side, then I deposited a few inches of the compost, then I moved the original material back on top. I did about a quarter of the raised bed at a time.

My compost pile seemed to have exactly the right amount to refill our raised vegetable bed.

Our tomato plants grow by themselves each year (presumably due to fallen spoiled tomatoes that end up burying seeds), and the way that I added the compost didn’t stop that from happening again.

The homemade compost seems to have fed our vegetables well!

We inherited our composting bin when we moved into our house. I’ve been happy with it, and decided to add another one, so I bought the same one.

When I bought it in Jan 2022, it cost $124, and took about a month to be delivered: https://triformis.com/products/soil-saver/ It’s made of nice solid material and has worked well, but my decision to buy it was largely because I wanted the second one to match the first. :-)