Teaching Urban Composting
August 15th, 2010 · 4 Comments · Posted in garden
Burying kitchen scraps in the compost pile
My composting system has been turned upside down this year. Normally I spend quite a bit of my time foraging the ingredients for my compost pile–leaves, grass clippings, coffee grounds–and managing a three-bin system for turning it all into the primary means of maintaining fertility in my vegetable beds. Despite all of that work, and storing materials in a family of metal trash cans, I find that I never have quite enough compost as I need for our kitchen garden here in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House.
The reason for confusion this year was the gift I received from our new friend J.P. at Envirelation, and his gift to us in the spring of a truckload of fresh compost made from kitchen scraps his company collects from restaurants, hospitals, schools and other commercial sources. That pile was enough to spread about four inches of compost on our vegetable beds–a huge amount, really, many times what we normally apply.
The result has been a garden on steroids. Would you believe cosmos flowers seven feet tall? But as I said, it threw my usual composting routine completely out of rhythm. Nevertheless, yesterday I entertained a dozen students eager to learn how to compost. They had signed up for the class through Ecolocity, a fairly new group here in D.C. dedicated to teaching people a more sustainable lifestyle. They are just one of several groups now pushing the idea of urban agriculture here in the nation’s capitol.
Composting takes so many different forms, I couldn’t begin to explain them all. The process is simply nature’s way of turning dead things back into the soil with the aid of bacteria, fungi, sow bugs, mites, earthworms and a host of other creatures. You can do it on a small scale, or a really big scale. San Francisco, for instance, now has mandatory curbside pickup of kitchen scrap and other compostable materials. In urban areas, people eager to be more enviro-friendly are desperate for ways to compost their waste, rather than sending it to the landfill.
We should be emulating the Chinese, who for thousands of years realized that in order to maintain fertility, it is essential to return to the soil the nutrients we remove from it. We don’t do that. For instance, the Chinese famously collected their own feces to fertilize their fields. They considered humanure golden. We treat ours like it’s toxic, and send it down the toilet to be disposed of in a distant treatment facility.
Composting can be done in small, commercially-made bins, or in a simple pile in the back yard. The best mix, I’ve found, is equal parts “brown” materials such as fallen leaves, straw, cardboard or newspaper, and “green” materials such as grass clippings, weeds, coffee grounds. (Just don’t put weeds that have gone to seed in your compost, or you risk spreading them everywhere.) Once you have your pile, you can bury your kitchen scraps in it and they will become compost as well.
All the microbes need to thrive and carry on their work is air, food and water. So give your pile a spray of water while you’re making it, and keep it just barely moist during the composting process. A pile of this sort will heat up to 150 or 160 degrees within a matter of days, then cool again, at which point you might want to turn it to give it some more air. But not to worry, your compost pile will decompose all by itself, even if you do nothing. If anything, you want to err on the side of having more “browns” in the pile, otherwise you could end up with an anaerobic decomposition–meaning starved for oxygen–which breeds bacteria that make those putrid, disgusting garbage smells.
Figure a year before your compost is actually ready to use. And for more details, check out my composting videos listed under the “video” header at the top of the blog.
Cool! I just watched your first video too. I’d love to learn more too. Composting is like a forgotten art.
The Chinese do use humanure directly on fields but they don’t eat salad! It would be quite dangerous to use uncomposted human waste on food crops that were not to be cooked thoroughly. Even when composted it would probably be safest to to use it on ornamental or orchard plantings.
There are unfortunately a lot of things we throw away that be could put to good use. Composting is a great step in the right directions. Thanks for showing people how to do it, Ed (I am more than a little envious of your gift! whoa!!!!)
We compost in the back yard but years ago, we used to have a worm compost bin in the basement. Fun and educational. I used to take it in to the grade school for science class everyonce in awhile.
I’ll never forget receiving the worms in the mail…opening the box and my 3 yr old gasping in awe and saying “Oh Mommy! Can we Name them?”