Kitchen Composting

Since our last article on composting, the city we live in has started accepting compostable materials on a weekly basis mixed in with yard waste.  While we applaud the effort to create more soil instead of adding more to landfills, we have come across a bit of a problem.

As part of the city-wide changes to promote composting, each household was given a small plastic bin meant to be placed in the kitchen and used to collect food scraps.  However, the bin is not airtight, which allows for the infiltration of fruit flies and the circulation of an at-times unpleasant scent.  After finding that the problem became increasingly worse as the summer wore on, something had to be done.

After careful consideration, our solution to the kitchen composting problem was to have a second container on-hand filled with dirt.  Then, every time we put something in the compost box, we take a scoop of dirt from the dirt container and add it to the compost box.  This eliminates both the fruit flies and the unpleasant scent to the point that we no longer even close the compost box, so as to make it even easier to add scraps.  Essentially, what we're doing is making our own mini-landfill with a twist.  Instead of just filling the land, we're rejuvenating it with nutrients.

The one main drawback of the approach is that the city-wide compost program does not accept dirt mixed in with the compost.  Subsequently, we've gone back to using our old compost tumbler, with much more satisfactory results than before.  It seems that it really takes a lot more brown matter than we thought.  So, this time we're adding more twigs, branches and leaves to help create an internal structure with enough spaces to allow for the passage of air.  So far, so good...