Permies Poll: Do you compost at home?

Instead of doing a breakdown poll, I figure I will start with a simple question. Do you compost at home?



Feel free to discuss the particulars below.

Early into my journey towards permaculture I had purchased a standing 65 gallon plastic compost bin that I have been using for household waste. I have also been adding in grass/leaves as time goes on and making some okay compost. It never got turned like it should and has been essentially just another waste stream instead of going towards a landfill.

Now that I own fowl, I have a separate uncontained pile for bedding/manure that is easier to turn. The compost streams are expanding!

I have various piles around the property where kitchen and yard waste get tossed when there's nothing better to do with them. I also have two worm bins, so some kitchen waste goes there. And I also chop and drop to let garden waste 'compost' in place as a mulch. I very much hope to finish my henhouse this spring, so that'll be another way that waste is a feedstock for humus-making.

Christopher, I envy your worm farm. I think this will be a part of the puzzle on my property, too.

j

Christopher Weeks wrote:I have various piles around the property where kitchen and yard waste get tossed when there's nothing better to do with them. I also have two worm bins, so some kitchen waste goes there. And I also chop and drop to let garden waste 'compost' in place as a mulch. I very much hope to finish my henhouse this spring, so that'll be another way that waste is a feedstock for humus-making.

I compost by tossing food scraps onto a pile of leaves.
The chickens shred that, then I turn the compost with a garden fork.
Rinse and repeat for great compost.
It does not get hot enough to kill weeds seeds, so I get a seed load with every scoop.
I am cool with that, given how little work it takes.

I am also running an aerobic liquid composting system.
An aquarium pump aerates organic matter and biochar in an old water heater tank.
The overflow is diverted into a charcoal filter/ urinal and then to a raised bed.
I plan to add this kind of fertigation to other beds, but using a solar powered fountain for aeration instead of a grid tied air pump.

My answer is "kind of".  I live in an apartment with a small patio and the grass yard is for everyone to share.  So I have a bucket for foodscraps and a bucket that holds finished compost.  I take the bucket full of foodscraps down to my MIL's house 55 min. SE of us when we go down to stay overnight, she adds it to her very functional compost setup which has her household foodscraps, plus yard debris from her yard, plus chicken bedding/waste.  And she gives me finished compost for my plant pots.  Hence the bucket of finished compost.

Someday I hope to have my own space to set things up, a yard, and hopefully a Bokashi system for meat and etc.  I want a good compost system that not only makes enough for my own gardening but makes enough for sharing perhaps.  

We have a stationary pile of leaves/grass that I add our kitchen scraps and the chicken's poopy straw bedding too. It seems to compost eventually. Every fall, we try to take our leaves and garden waste (stalks, dead plants) and make 18 day compost, turning every other day. But you would still need a way to handle waste the rest of the year.

Not as such. The garden has a hole, and everything from leaves to sticks to kitchen waste to ash and charcoal gets tossed in. Periodically I toss a layer of dirt on top. When it gets full I plant something on top, and dig a new hole. The holes when new are about 3 feet (one meter) deep and 4-5 feet across. A few rotting logs go in the bottom, so it's also a huegle. Usually 2 holes per year, one spring and one late fall. I suppose composing puritans will say I am doing it wrong.

I do compost at home; home is one of the older houses on a 1 block cul de sac off of a mixed residential/commercial street near the NW urban growth boundary of Eugene OR. The lot is a half acre and was formerly "Big Daddy Ed's Good Used Cars" and was purchased for 45K cash by my partner because 1) she had the money and 2) it was a nice walk from her then place of work, Jerry's Home Improvement Center on US 99. A few weeks later she was diagnosed with a virulent form of lung cancer and in 4 months it was all mine whether I wanted it or not. I would rather have waited for her to outlive me.  The lot hosts some of the largest, tallest trees in NW Eugene on the N. property line. The soil is heavy clay loam, formerly annually burned Camas Meadow, and sometimes will sprout native Madia sativa, a DYC (damn yellow composite) (aka Tarweed or for the early American Insurgents, "Indian Wheat" Smear a leaf on a new mosquito bite= no itch. (I also think the seeds would be AWESOME in a bioregional Gomasio) I am still finding auto parts, and there are spots where crushed river gravel was placed when things got  too mucky.  SO: compost!  I decided on a grid of east-west garden beds, and each occasionally gets a compost pile built on it over 4-8 months. The next spring it gets squash/punkins/melons put in it as starts in a pocket of finished compost. In following years the pile contributes finished compost to other piles or near fruit trees or gifted to friends. (my compost was started in Portland in 1981 and included significant amounts of Mt. St. Helens ash, and a homeopathically small amount  of my wife's ashes) I began the composting style at Lost Valley when there was lots of feedstock and the soil was low nutrient clay, so digging it in was futile: best to build on top.  I am finally getting beds that I can till (gently) Oh yes, almost forgot: I use huge amounts of cellulose/high carbon material; branches, dry weeds, chips and city leaves, paper and offset that with "Compost Activator #1", (AKA Vit. P) to add the necessary Nitrogen, as does the occasional honorable interment in a pile of an unfortunate roadkill animal. There lately is a huge fat possum making the rounds of the piles. (Story is the Arkies brought them in during the Dust Bowl migrations for a familiar delicacy)

We have an open pile on the side of the house walled off by 4 pallets that we throw all our non-dairy, non-meat food scraps into as well as leaves and weeds. Some neighbors call it "bear food" but I saw a bear walk by it once, he took one sniff and just kept going.  

We don't turn it, I just take some scoops of the black gold from the bottom and plop it uphill from my veggies thinking when it rains they will benefit from some compost tea.  A peach tree and nectarine tree grew from it, which we transplanted.  After 15 years there are so many worms in that pile!

Found out by accident that 5 gal pots planted in October with a few old potatoes and about 5 or 6 inches of dirt and slowly filled with kitchen scraps grow worthwhile crops of potatoes as well as producing pots of vermicompost when the worms move in. Forget about them mostly during the rainy winter here in N Cal and they grow themselves. Picture is harvest from 4 pots.

I bought years back 2 'earthmakers' which are/were made in New Zealand. The best type of compost bin I have ever had. I live in Lanzarote, Canary Islands, and got them shipped out to me from UK. one is kept in the middle of the garden surrounded by pallets, but is bending under the heat of the sun, so even though it is covered, I've got to pull it apart and straighten up the sides. (you buy it flat packed).  so, every week I rake up everything from the hen yard plus leaves, soak pile for a week in water, then top up the bin. THe bins are full of worms and because they can move up and down, they choose where they want to be regarding heat. So my bins are kind of Hot compost and then cold compost. The soil is Lanzarote is hard dry clay. I mulch on top - I don't use the volcanic ash as I have many trees in the garden/food forest/ to help mitigate both excess wind and sun. I love my compost bins. The veggies love the enriched soil too.

While not at the scale of at home composting, I found this tidbit of information useful.

For every million metric ton of organic waste that decomposes. 496 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gases are released.

By composting, these emissions are lessened by more than fifty percent.

(Source)

I only have two people living in my household, but we are doing our part. Other ways to cut your carbon footprint can be found here.

I tend to compost in the summer time here when the fruit trees are so over loaded a lot ends up on the ground so I'll go around with a bucket and collect about a bucket full or two every morning. The county here offers free composting silo bins which makes it convenient. However the invasive rose ringed parakeets as of this year have migrated to this side of the Island and are expected to be wiping out fruit tree yields so I'm guessing I won't get nearly as much compost moving forward.

Our local transfer station is very active, always offering composting workshops and the like.  This is where I got my five big black composters and the Green Cone.  I have them around the property where I can deposit weeds and such.  Off the back porch is my main food composter.  I keep a tall rectangular container on the door of my refrigerator (haven't had a fruit fly since doing this) and when it's full, I just empty it right outside off in the composter off the back porch near the driveway.  I also planted a number of evergreens on the hypotenuse of the back corners of the property.  Behind them is where I dump brush like blueberry prunings and other debris that I pick up in my pull-behind cart when I'm doing large cleanup.  

I love that solution, because it hides the mess year round.  Evergreens, by their very nature, are wide at the base and it is a year-round screen.  I don't really harvest that compost, because the roots of trees tend to snake through it all, but it is a lovely wildlife habitat.  Last winter, during a windstorm, two of the smaller evergreens were snapped.  They fell beautifully behind the others, not hitting them or the perimeter of the fence.  When I was back there dumping a load, a bunny went tearing out of it, so I know animals are using it.  I probably shouldn't encourage bunnies, but they are awfully cute.  I was thinking about taking the cages off of my little trees, when I noticed one of the branches of a brand new plum planting was cut off.  Instead of taking the cages off, I ended up adding another.  Trying to work with nature!

In case you're wondering, the green cone is a double-walled unit that is supposed to cook down meat bones and scraps.  It really does not work for me.  I think if I just used it for fat and softer stuff, it would, but I haven't seen bones break down at all.  Bummer.  I keep a gallon sized baggie with meat scraps in the freezer, and when it's full, I'll throw it out.  The problem is, I only have to bring one bag of garbage every six months or so, so if I dump it in the trash barrel, it will really start to stink in that time.  Maybe I should separate the bones from the softer stuff like fat and make biochar when the ziplock baggie gets full.

I wish I had time and land to do biochar, but for now I have a 2 pallet wide x 1 pallet high x 1 pallet deep box that I compost in, and besides all the kitchen scraps, grass clippings and leaves I can manage, I have a neighbor with pet goats that I collect the soiled bedding from, and I drive around in the fall to collect the lawn bags of leaves and bales of hay that the neighbors leave out. Whatever I don't use in compost becomes the winter blanket  for my garden. I've never once tested any levels, but I haven't really needed to.

I have been composting in various ways, similar to what people have already mentioned, for about 30 years now. Just in the last two months I decided to try and create a hot pile according to Elaine Ingham's technique. I bought a compost thermometer and coincidentally found a curbside bonanza in the form of 3 paper lawn bags full of small high-carbon material like old bits of wood chip and pine cones, etc. I built my pile, stuck in the thermometer and waited. It went up to 150 in less than 24 hours. I have turned it twice since then and it hasn't gone that high again, but it has gone up enough.

I think there are a few things that have finally made the difference for me:
1. everything chopped small with a shovel and mixed together.
2. heavy  on the carbon
3.  spray it with a hose.
4. build the whole pile in one go.

Footnote: my kids are grown and I don't work full time. I never had the time or energy to do this method when I was much younger. I just always said, "Ain't gonna happen. Cold pile will have to do."
If you don't think you can do something, just do what you can. You never know what the future has waiting for you.

My composting facility at home is laughable, but I've got one. It's just two medium sized pots where I pour and mix ingredients and sometimes water. I have it at home just for adding some extra magic to my potted plants.
The big compost bin is in the orchard where I carry most of my kitchen scraps.

It looks like every body is doing some kind of composting here. How about creating a poll about different methods?

Yes! We throw our food scraps and land maintenance scraps into a pile on the property and turn it every once in a while. It was one of the first things I started because I wanted to give back to the earth because the soil here is so deficient in nutrients.

Yes, have done for years.

Glynis Cooper wrote:Yes, have done for years.

Welcome to Permies!

We compost in two 32 gallon cans with wheels and a large pile for chicken bedding/grass clippings/large loads that we don't want to overwhelm the cans with. One can every six months, with the finished compost added to garden beds. We save the fall leaves for the brown addition to the cans along with kitchen and garden scraps, and ashes from cooking fires (I like to grill outside over coals).
Planning to use another closed can (with screened vents near the top) for humanure once I get my materials turned into a dry, "composting" toilet.

YES, several ways..

We hot compost everything under the banana plants and layer on leaves dirt and mulch.

About 6 years ago... I had the kitchen window opened for some reason, and set the "under the sink compost collector" up on the window sill. The flies soon showed up. It was very creepy.

May Lotito wrote:It looks like every body is doing some kind of composting here. How about creating a poll about different methods?

Thank you for the idea!

A new Permies poll asking that very question can be found here.

Last vote in apple poll was on June 9, 2024