Kitchen Compost - Composting is in vogue. Everyone’s talking about composting. Years ago, Dr. Kevin Lehman wrote a book entitled “Sex Begins in the Kitchen” but nowadays what’s really getting homemakers excited is the fact that “Compost begins in the Kitchen”!
In these days of economic struggles, many are looking for ways to become more self sufficient. In our estimation, creating your own compost is taking a giant step forward towards self sufficiency. Composting is essentially taking materials that were once living and allowing them to complete their life cycle, by combining them with other organic materials that are in various stages of decomposing they finally turn into a black rich soil that adds life giving substance to your garden soil.
To make your own compost you must collect your kitchen waste. So the natural question is, what can I collect my waste in? In doing research for our needs, I have come across many lovely and expensive kitchen compost bins. You can set them on your counter or under your sink. The nicer ones even have filters in them to contain odor form the decomposing food. After looking at and pricing these attractive containers I decided that a 1 quart, hard plastic, measuring container works just fine for collecting kitchen compost.
As you can see from the picture above, we keep ours on the countertop. It gets filled once or twice a day depending on how much food is being prepared that day. Then we dump it into a 7 gallon bucket (the kind you can find at a hardware store) in the garage that is lined with a garbage bag. The bucket has a cover that fits loosely to keep the flies out (not entirely successful). It takes us about 2 weeks to fill the 7 gallon bucket, but sometimes it has gone as long as 3 weeks before we have layered it with brown/dry yard waste (grass, leaves, sticks, etc) in our compost bin in the back yard.
The conclusion we've come to is there is no need to spend the money on fancy kitchen compost bins unless you simply want a more attractive look. Simple containers for collecting kitchen waste should work fine. You'll notice that there is no odor from a days worth of kitchen scraps (make sure you don't include any animal products) sitting on your counter. The same is true with the 7 gallon bucket; the cover contains any odor being generated, until of course you're ready to dump it into your compost pile. But that's another story…
