Yesterday the New York Times ran a piece on urban composting: an activity of intrepid city folks who refuse to let their waste go to waste. They find hideaway spots for their trays of worms and decomposing matter, with smells and flies kept at bay by the happily munching earthworms. It made us wonder: are you an urban composter?
Trays of vermiculture and soggy newspapers aren't the only avenue to urban composting, of course. Certain close relatives of ours are diehard composters with no garden space right now, so they freeze all their kitchen scraps and take bags back to friends in the country, friends with more expansive gardens and real compost piles.
There's also a more technologically-oriented solution. My husband and I received a NatureMill composter as a wedding gift last summer. We were extremely excited to get started with it, but it's been a learning curve. There's been smell, and mold, and the cranky behavior you expect of a two-year-old. We call it our baby, now, and we laugh at its slight eccentricities. It's a great gadget, and we love using it even more now that we've figured it out a bit.
But even technology-assisted composting takes some study. (And in full disclosure, we were traveling a lot during the fall and winter, so that neglect may have been the root cause of most of those problems!)
Once you've got it rolling, it is quite a thrill to see that rich, dense, black soil come out -- a feast for garden plants. We plan on feeding our vegetable garden very well in the spring!
We do hope that food composting becomes just as prevalent as recycling; it benefits the earth in so many ways.
• Read the Times piece: Urban Composting: A New Can of Worms
Related: San Francisco's Curbside Composting Program
(Images: Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times)
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We compost and place the scraps in containers on the counter then take them to the compost bin next to our garden a few times a week.
That article was all right. I thought the worms trying to escape was funny and sad. Composting can go wrong when it is not executed correctly for the circumstance. I have apartment composted before and it was trial and error before I got it figured out.
Fort Greene park (and plenty of other parks, often that have farmer's markets) has a weekly compost drop off - so it is more like "collecting" than "composting" but does the trick for me.
YES! I just started composting in Philadelphia. I have an Envirocycle which is a great bin- doesn't take up much space, easy to turn and latches up to keep critters out. We keep our waste in the freezer until we have a good amount to take out back. I've been blogging about the process. You can check out the bin at kitchenplay.blogspot.com/2009/02/envirocycle-is-here.html.
I'm another Ft. Greene composter.. I have containers of the stuff in my fridge, as I have a really hard time knowing that perfectly good nutrients are just sitting in landfills. Unfortunately I have a hard time getting there more than once a month, so I tend to have 2-3 large containers each time.
After spending a year in a market garden there was no way I could go back to not composting. It was like this world opened up. The first thing I did when I moved into my duplex was to go buy a cheap plastic bucket to keep under the sink and told my roommate that we would be composting out back.
I'm still at the beginning of the Rodale Book of Composting, but I've been collecting scraps in the pile for two months now. Omaha is currently frozen and so not a lot has been going on, but that's good as I haven't gotten any manure or grass clippings yet. In the few warm sunny days we have had there has been more decomposition than I expected and it's going to be time to get a real container for it soon as right now it's sitting behind a piece of fallen fence so that the neighbor doesn't get grossed out.
Next week some friends are coming to visit from the garden and are (hopefully) bringing me a batch of worms.
I'm lucky to live in San Francisco where the garbage guys pick up compost every week because I have no garden to compost to (although maybe with years of composting I could make enough dirt to cover my concrete backyard in rich soils!).
Faith...thanks for the feedback on the NatureMill. Most helpful! I'm going to get one. I think of it as the AeroGarden of composting.
I compost in the summer when it's warm enough for the food to decompose here but in Toronto we have a municipal wet waste system so even if you don't take it out to your own backyard, it still gets composted.
We do this. I try never to look at the worms and just pretend that compost fairies spirit the scraps away. We have had problems with mold growing inside the worm tower, but otherwise, it is easy and doesn't smell.
Nature Mill is pretty much the worst product ever invented. For one thing, we had THREE break on us, in different ways, over a one year period. The most disappointing thing about them breaking was being unable to fix one of the problems. Then we were even more disappointed when we realized how difficult it is to recycle the NatureMill parts. It is made of styrofoam! After tinkering with this finicky thing, we have found 1) it cannot handle the food waste of a 4-person household of avid vegetable eaters. We had to resort back to the worm bin to handle all of our waste. We do not even waste food once it's on our plates! I am only talking about vegetable scraps and coffee grounds. 2) It does not transfer compost from the mixing compartment to the tray compartment very well. Food almost always gets stuck in there and you have to manually move it to the tray below. 3) It is smelly! I don't know if it's the heat or what, but vegetable scraps coffee grounds in a worm bin = no smell and vegetable scraps coffee grounds in a NatureMill = nasty rancid smell. We tried adding the sawdust pellets the recommend and that does help a bit. However it seems entirely wasteful and unnecessary to have to power a composter with electricity and then purchase sawdust to keep it from getting too moist. 3) The first NatureMill we ordered arrived BROKEN. The manufacturer knew about the problem, and sent us a part to fix OURSELVES nearly two weeks later. um, thanks. Why not just send us a machine that was going to work in the first place?
The Bokashi system is brilliant. It uses a sawdust type mixture with micro-organisms that pickle the bucket's contents. No foul odours, and you can put anything in it - including meat. You just need a friend with a garden willing to bury the end product. More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokashi_composting
I agree that the Bokashi system is great but watch out for leaky taps. Mine leaked over the kitchen floor – now that was stinky!
I'm lucky enough to live in Seattle where we have a yard waste/compost pickup, you can buy it back in the spring for the garden! We live in a rental and our landlord doesn't want us composting on site. We are getting a worm bin together to do some composting on site for our container gardens.
I've definitely had friends who trim a paper bag (grocery) and store that in the freezer to collect food waste in their apartments.. Helps with the smell if you can't take our your scraps every day!