Compost Ingredients

We save all our kitchen scraps for our compost pile.  We have a plastic container which holds about a gallon that we keep in the cabinet under the kitchen sink.  You can see a picture of it if you look at my post from July 9, 2010.  Here is a link to it:


http://windyacresnaturalfarm.blogspot.com/2010/07/kitchen-compost-bucket.html

When the bucket gets full, we take it out and dump it in our compost pile.  The other day I took the bucket out to dump it and was struck by the variety of materials in it.

On the surface this looks pretty gross, but these are all great ingredients for compost.  There  are old rotten bananas here, broccoli that has been in the frig too long, radishes, potato peelings, coffee filters along with coffee grounds, a couple of cherry tomatoes, kale that is past its prime and house plant trimmings. 


After I dumped these onto the top of the compost pile, I grabbed a bag of leaves and dumped on top.  This creates a series of layers of different materials.  If you were doing this for a home garden, you would want to turn the pile using a pitchfork every 2-3 weeks to mix these layers together.  However, since we just use this small compost bin as a holding place until we can mix them into the larger pile we have out in the field, I don't worry about turning it.


Composting is a wonderful way to recycle your kitchen scraps.   If you don't have room for a compost pile, then just try burying your scraps in your garden.  They will eventually decompose and add nutrients to the soil.