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A special shout-out to Ms. Koenig's class from The Cleary Mountain Middle School in Virginia for their hard work to learn about composting! They even sent a link to a website we didn't know about. Scroll down to learn more!
Question: At home, how do you start a compost pile?
Answer:
Composting at home is a simple and effective way of “keeping it in the cycle” by turning waste back into food. Now, if you do nothing at all, the Fungus, Bacteria and Invertebrates will take care of decomposing your waste on their own. What we want to figure out is the best way to compost in your home without it smelling, attracting animals, or taking too long to create any useable soil. It’s going to be up to you to figure a lot of this out, so you need to ask yourself a few questions:
· Do you have space outside for a composter, or will it have to be inside your home?
· If there is space outside, will the compost be kept near your house, or can it be placed far enough away that you don’t need to worry about the smell?
· Are you going to have yard waste like dead leaves and grass clippings to put in, or will it only be food?
· Do you have a garden on which to put the finished compost, or will you have to find someone else who wants it?
· How much money are your parents willing to spend and how much work are you willing to put in?
Based on the answers to these questions and others, you’ll first have to decide what kind of composter to use.
A compost pile is simply a pile of compost sitting on the ground. These only make sense if you have a lot of space and a lot of compost – for example, if you live on a farm.
In enclosed compost piles, containers hold the compost together, allowing more heat to build up than in a loose pile.
Compost Tumblersare bins that can spin to allow oxygen to get to all parts of the compost inside. These work quickly and don’t need much space.
Worm Binslike the one we have at Teva can go anywhere they can be kept warm. We even take one with us on the Topsy Turvy Teva Bus Tours! They’re great, but relatively high-maintenance.
More about these and other methods of composting can be found at http://www.composting101.com/compost-bins.html.
Once you have a composter, you have to feed it and maintain it. Composts need a balanced diet, and shouldn’t be fed anything plastic or covered in pesticides, paint, or bleach (white paper products are usually bleached). The balance has to do with Carbon and Nitrogen, or “Browns” and “Greens.” Check out http://www.composting101.com/c-n-ratio.html for more info. Maintaining your compost means making sure it’s not too dry and not too wet, and can breathe. Mix your compost around and turn it over to allow it to breath.
This is all just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to know more, there’s plenty more to know! Or if you’re a braver soul, just go for it, and ask others for advice. Again, this stuff wants to become soil, so odds are you’ll do ok if you use your intuition.
Good luck! Here are some sites to visit:
http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/rrr/composting/index.htm
http://www.howtocompost.org/info/info_Top-10-Composting-Tips.asp
Thanks to Whitney from The Cleary Mountain Middle School in Virginia for sending us this great link:
http://www.phonemarketings.com/kids-composting-guide.html
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