Composting is SO COOL!
That's not even sarcasm. It is really the neatest, dorkiest thing ever. Maybe it wouldn't be as cool if I wasn't so into science, it's hard to say. It's been four months since we started composting and the shear weight and volume of material that has been diverted to our backyard compost bin is pretty incredible. I haven't been keeping a tally of exactly what's gone into the bin but I do know that we have filled it to bursting at least a dozen times. (Total volume of the compost tumbler, 37 gallons.) I'll be pushing material in and thinking to myself "okay, this is it, we're going to close it up soon and let the last material in decompose." Then I check it a week later and half the volume has disappeared into thin air. So, some adventures from the last four months.
Adventure the First.
I've become
that person. The person I said I wouldn't become. The one who brings a spare plastic container to work so that I can bring home my orange peels or apple cores and compost them. After four months of composting, throwing things like that out just doesn't sit well with me anymore. My husband rolls his eyes but is reasonably good-natured about it.
Adventure the Second.
Having guests over. Sometime, back when this all started, my husband and I had a conversation that went something like this:
Husband: You're not going to compost at parties are you?
Me: Of course not! That would be a ridiculous pain!
Well. That went the same way as "of course I won't bring compostables home from work." I spent the first party we threw after the compost tumbler was set up cringing at food waste going into the trash. Now I set out three bins at parties: compost, trash, and recycling. And our friends have been fantastic about it.
Adventure the Third.
But won't it smell? I often ask guests to the house if they would like to come out to the compost with me. Often this is because guests mean extra food, which means that I need an extra set of hands to carry everything. This invitation is often met with a concern over the smell. No one wants to hang out with smelly stuff. I sure don't. That's okay though because the compost doesn't smell. It's pretty incredible but a well balanced compost is pretty unscented. We had one incident early on when the compost was getting a little too dry. I added moisture and then we entered rainy season. I'll admit that it smelled for a while then. I had to start scrounging for carbon sources to add, which leads me to...
Adventure the Fourth.
Importing other people's compostables. Leaves are a great source of carbon for compost. That's awesome and easy if you live in someplace where leave drop easily and often. If you live in southern Texas though, there just aren't enough leaves to keep up with our food trash. Especially in the rainy part of the summer when everything is hot and wet all the time and nothing dries out ever because the humidity is ridiculous. Paper is another great carbon source but it composts quicker if it's shredded. We don't own a shredder so I now import shredded paper from other people. We keep a whole cabinet of it on hand to add when we add another batch of kitchen waste.
Adventure the Fifth.
Mushrooms. Oh my goodness the mushrooms. I thought at one point that the compost was molding. That does happen sometimes and is a good indicator that we are not adding enough carbon or that it needs more oxygen, or both. Some vigorous tumbling and a little poking around though (with a long stick) proved that my compost wasn't molding. It was growing the largest mushrooms I have ever seen. Coincidentally, the mushrooms of doom started appearing about three weeks after a batch of mushroom scraps made their way into the tumbler. Go figure. A composting friend says that these are called "volunteers." She recently had some volunteer cantaloupes come out of her compost. I did not cultivate my mushrooms. No problem though, they are organic (very, very organic in this case) and simply decomposed once the temperature of the pile heated back up.
I really wasn't sure how the backyard science experiment in composting would go. We still haven't harvested any dirt, though we could if we needed to. So far though, it's just really cool. Sometimes I take food out and just spend a little while poking in the compost with a stick to check out how quickly different things decompose. Yes, that does make me pretty weird. That's okay. My parents assure me that the Oscar the Grouch "I love trash" was my favorite as a kid. I'm sure they
especially loved me singing it in public, which I was apparently pretty fond of. So maybe this whole composting thing was pretty predictable after all.
