A Procrastinator's Guide to Kitchen Composting Without Smells or Gnats!

I am a procrastinator. Which means that my food scraps, which I have every intention of composting, always end up hanging around in the kitchen for much longer than I intended. Which makes the kitchen smell bad, and also creates hordes of gnats. I've tried multiple solutions for this over the years...

Resolve to always take the scraps to the compost immediately: Hahaha! I'm a procrastinator, remember? I am not physically, mentally, or emotionally capable of sticking with this sort of resolution for more than one day.

Keep a bucket right outside the door to dump the scraps into, for later transport to the compost pile: This makes a soupy, smelly MESS in the bucket, which just makes me procrastinate more, because I don't want to open OR dump that disgusting bucket!

Buy lots of sundew plants to eat the gnats: Helps minimally with the gnats, if I can keep the sundews alive, but does nothing for the smell.

Make DIY gnat killer: Same as above, plus I end up with icky jars of fermenting gnat juice sitting around the kitchen, because procrastinator, remember?

But I've FOUND THE SOLUTION, so procrastinators everywhere can finally be successful composters AND have clean-smelling, gnat-free kitchens! Here's what you need:

Cats that use litter boxes (or friends who have some)

Two (or more) of the squarish buckets that clumping kitty litter comes in -- these are ideal because they stack nicely and are easy to open and close and don't trigger any procrastination tendencies as a result.

Sawdust, pellet litter / wood stove pellets, dry leaves, shredded paper, used paper towels, etc. (Hereinafter referred to as just "sawdust," because we procrastinators are typically also lazy, but that's okay, because that's how we come up with awesome solutions like this one!)

Fill one bucket with sawdust, and a scoop of some sort depending on the type of "sawdust" you've chosen. Put a 1" layer of sawdust in the bottom of the second bucket, and stack it on top of the first bucket. Stick it next to your kitchen garbage can or somewhere near the sink. Scraps go in the top bucket, and anything soupy or potentially smelly gets a layer of sawdust over it. Don't skimp -- give it enough to fully cover the smelly things, or to soak up the juice of the soupy things. When the top bucket gets full, set it aside to go dump in the compost pile, and start a new one. If it takes a while for you to get around to dumping them, that's okay -- just get more buckets. It's already composting in the bucket(s), and it's not going to smell bad OR attract gnats, no matter how long it takes you to get tired of tripping over it and finally go dump it out!

Ruth, way to go!!
Excellent way to manage kitchen composting. It is exactly the way I manage my humanure, but in round buckets.

Angela Wilcox wrote:It is exactly the way I manage my humanure

That's exactly what gave me the idea to try this method. 😁

Would this translate easily into a vermicomposting setup or would it need to be modified a lot?

Ruth Rogers wrote:

That's exactly what gave me the idea to try this method. 😁

😁

If you sprinkle biochar in there and a little garden/forest soil, you've got an amazing system.

Mercy Pergande wrote:Would this translate easily into a vermicomposting setup or would it need to be modified a lot?

Hmmm. I think it could work. I mean, with vermicomposting you do the same thing; put your scraps in and cover them up. It would just need to be large enough to support enough worms to handle your daily production of kitchen scraps, and you'd need to add a means of drainage.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:If you sprinkle biochar in there and a little garden/forest soil, you've got an amazing system.

I'll try that, thanks!

Great idea!I'm going to do that this winter. That will cut down on trekking to the compost pile in the snow.

But during the growing season, the Ruth Stout 'no-work' gardening tip is pretty easy. I'd say composting doesn't get any easier. Reid, a Boot at Wheaton Labs just made a short video about it. Check it out here  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwj0SKuqP1c

Our solution went the other direction.

We were rubbish at dealing composting scraps until we got chickens. Like you the stuff sat in the kitchen too long and festered. Now those same scraps are chicken treats, and it gets emptied literally every day. Even an open top bowl never sits around long enough to go yucky or attract bugs. And it feels good dealing with it because the chickens are SO happy to see you when you carry a bowl!