Last year, my husband and I had our first, and somewhat failure of an attempt of making compost from kitchen scraps. Despite all the things I love about living in this village, one thing that I find a bit unfortunate is that there is no program for collecting compostable waste. You can drop your compost and garden cuttings off at the local dump, but there isn’t a program specific to recycling kitchen scraps like Ottawa. After spending the last couple of years using Ottawa’s green bin program – and prior to that using Japan’s extensive recycling program, I couldn’t help but feel guilty about throwing our kitchen scraps into the trash. On that note, we decided to buy a backyard composter.

I remember growing up my parents had a compost machine in our backyard. It was a black cone like structure that opened on the top, where you would add new scraps whenever you had them. The bottom of the pile gradually became compost that you could use in the garden. Rather than using that method, we decided to buy a rotating compost machine from Lee Valley. The idea is that you put your organic waste into one vessel and then once it fills up, start using the other vessel. You wait for the first vessel to age, rotate it now and then, and voila! compost! Or that is how it should have gone. To start, we looked up the different things you can and cannot put into a composter. For example, you’re not to put animal byproducts such as dairy or meat – or else you can attract some unwanted critters. Onions and garlic take a longer time to compost so are for the more advanced composters. Things such as bananas are good for adding potassium, etc. While we were optimistic about composting, we were also distracted with my pregnancy, and what started as a project with good intentions turned into throwing multiple ears of corn into both sides of the compost machine. We also naively threw in so-called ‘compostable’ bags. As the summer days went on, and my fatigue increased, the composter became a smelly neglected box that attracted flies. So it goes.

And yet, we are undeterred! This year we have decided to start again. On a sunny afternoon last week, during one of my son’s naps, we took a hesitant (and slightly terrified) peak into the composter. My husband kindly reached in and pulled all of the contents out. What we found was that many of our vegetable scraps like carrots and radish peels had dissolved into humus (success!). That being said, the corn stalks remained pretty much intact and the “compostable” bags were also very much still there. Tricked again by green-washing. Unfortunately I do not have any photos.

In order to start a new, we have decided to try out a revised list of things we’ll put into our compost. We also switched to using a steel bucket, without any devious plastic bags. We’re no longer going to add garden scraps like twigs or sticks to the compost. We’re going to focus on adding things like peelings from root vegetables, ground coffee, tea leaves, and fruits. I’ll check back in on our progress in a couple of months.

One thing I’m curious about – and considering – is whether it would be beneficial to add worms to our composter to speed up the process. I’ve seen this done for miniature composters in apartment buildings but wondering if the box would be too hot in the sun for them. If you know, please comment and let me know!

As an aside – the daffodils are starting to bloom in the garden. Leaves are starting to bud on our trees. And finally the irises and sedum are popping up! I’ll likely make another post next week.