Composting is Fun! and good for the green lifestyle!

Composting: the collecting of ones kitchen scraps and paper products, mixing together for a few months and creating black gold! If you don't know already, composting is a great way to be green! Not only are you not throwing your organic garbage in the landfill to rot and add to the escalating amounts of methane, but you're creating the worlds best fertilizer! It's the circle of life all inside of a garbage pail. You ad organic material, add water, add more material, wait, stir, wait, stir, add, wait, stir...when your compost is a nice shade of black, you are ready to put it in your garden where you will grow tasty, healthy vegetables that you will cut up and throw the scraps into your compost pile and thus, the circle continues.

My wife and I have been composting all of our non-cooked kitchen scraps (minus meat product and dairy) and all of our shredded office paper in our backyard composter for the last three months. We have noticed that we are taking the garbage out less and less each week and truley destroying our disposed financial documents (who wants to dig through my compost for my credit card number?) We also throw in all of our dryer lint, paper towel and toilet paper tubes, weeds, dead leaves, egg shells, fireplace ashes, etc.
So far, we have only filled our 25 gallon trash can less than half way. You can use any container you want to hold your compost, we chose this 25 gallon Brute trash can for its compact size and tight fitting lid. We just leave it in the back yard and let it do it's magic. I stir it about once a week to airrate it and to mix all the good stuff together. I added a little water to begin the pile with and haven't added any more lately. You want it moist, not wet, but moist. If you have to much liquid drain it off into a bucket and dissolve 1 cup of the tasty brown liquid into one gallon of water to make "compost tea." You can then give all of your plants a drink of this perfect food. It's like a V8 for your plants! You want to make sure you have a good 1 to 3 ratio of greens (kitchen scraps, weeds, lawn cutting, etc.) and browns (carboard, newspaper, office paper, etc)... This makes sure you have a perfect mixture of carbon and nitrogen, which make the compost alive. I have thought about adding some red worms to the mix, but I am afraid I will bake them in the container. I am looking at some worm farms to help break down some of my waste sooner.

I will be updating everyone on the progress of my compost bin. I plan on using it in my Square Foot Garden...Coming Soon!!!

Here's a couple links for extended reading on composting:

How to compost.org

Tree hugger.com