Adventures in composting

Our family has been composting now for the past 6 years, and we are by no means veterans. So when a friend, who is a total pro at all things green, asked me to share my experiences with composting, my response was similar to the guy from the vintage Godrej shaving cream ad that most Indians my age know - “Who me?”. There she was with her Midas touch (yep all garbage changes to gold at her home) and her green fingers, and here I am a bungling novice at best at anything I do in the garden. So you wonder how I came around to writing this post.

Well for starters you never say no to Ms.Midas Touch who singlehandedly raises  our group’s karmic greenness points by example, and a bit of guilt :) Secondly there is a reason why books for dummies have a huge market – there are a lot more dummies at everything than there are experts.

So dummies at composting, this is a post dedicated to you, from one dummy to another. I know you’ve always wanted to do the right thing, but it has just been so hard. And let’s face it – the beginner’s composting workshop is not really for beginners, is it? When they start talking about brown Vs green, carbon Vs nitrogen, heat Vs moisture, you are kicking yourself for not having paid any attention to the physical sciences in high school, and just when you are ready to give up they hit you with biological forms that you’ve tried very hard all your life to steer away from - flies, ants, worms, rodents!

But do not despair, there is hope for all of us! I first approached composting pretty much the same way as I approached most things in life (marriage, programming, motherhood, driving, cooking, birding,...) – A combination of naivety and arrogance (by now you understand I am serious about the dummy part) – “How hard can this be?” And just like all those things I mentioned, I was quickly humbled, realized that this can be very hard, but can also be very rewarding if you decide to keep at it.

We were in a townhome back then with not much of a backyard, and our first"compost bin" was an old trash can with holes poked through; brown material was mainly dried eucalyptus leaves which generously covered our yard, and green material well all kitchen waste. We didn't cut up the kitchen waste, didn't realize that eucalyptus leaves were too oily to breakdown quickly, didn't keep turning the compost frequently - all rookie mistakes. Sure enough we were faced with flies, foul smell and filth that we had to quickly discard before our neighbors caught wind. This bad start kept us away from composting for quite sometime.

What made it more difficult to accept defeat was the fact that we clearly understood the problems of filling up our landfills with garbage that can be "easily" diverted, the need for organic replenishment of the soil, and the fact that having joined a CSA we were bringing home carrot tops, brussel sprout stalks, cauliflower fringes that despite our best intentions to eat everything from the box were ending up in trash more frequently than I would've liked. 

That's when I stumbled upon an electronic composter which claimed to have converted the art of composting into a science - repeatable, simple steps that any dummy can follow! So for our 10th wedding anniversary we bought ourselves an electronic composter (No, we are not very romantic people). Yes it was plugged in, yes we had to chop up the produce (which by now we had learned), yes we had to use saw dust pellets for the brown material, and no we couldn't do dairy/ meat (both were not consumed at our home anyway). But for the first time composting worked for us! For a small home here was a neat solution which diverted more than half of our weekly kitchen waste, produced good quality compost in 2 weeks (instant gratification, in compost years that is!). The family was happy - less trash meant fewer trips to throw the garbage, enough compost to feed our small kitchen garden, and very minimal power draw that the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks.

More importantly, the small electronic composter did a few intangible things for us

1) Boosted our confidence
2) Now that we saw how much trash we were able to divert we couldn't go back to not composting - very similar to any technology adoption. Once you have a 45mpg hybrid car very hard to choose anything less for your next car, once you have high speed data modems you will not go to dial-up - similarly once you cut down trash by half you don't go back to producing more trash, you only want to push the boundaries to see if you can divert trash even further
3) We had no qualms signing up to a CSA or buying whole watermelons

It's been 5 years and we are in a bigger home with a bigger yard and as a corollary generating more yard waste. So for our 15th wedding anniversary we went ahead and bought ourselves 2 giant tumbling composters (I was serious about the non-romantic part), neatly set up in our backyard right next to our much enlarged veggie raised bed. No instant gratification this time as it takes nearly 2 to 3 months to fill up our tumbler, and yes tumbling it when full requires the strength of an ox, and we are yet to see our first compost. But to quote Mrs.Thatcher "the lady's not for turning"... back, I mean. Composting has become just one other thing we do.

The other day when one of us "tumbled" the composter with the lid not locked (do you really need more evidence that "dummy" was not really self-deprecating humor on our side), we didn't fret one bit - we gathered the mush of material that fell to the ground with no hesitation and put it back in the composter without holding our noses, 'cos frankly the smell was not that of garbage but just earthy. No flies, no filth and no complaints from neighbors. We are still learning about our composter, what it does well and what it does not, or as our daughter likes to say "what it likes to eat and what it does not", but the pride we feel as a family when we set out our minimal trash for pick-up is priceless.
 

So here is my salute to all those wonderful folks and organizations who set us on this journey either directly or indirectly - AID, Inika, Solana Center, C.Srinivasan of Exnora Green Cross, and numerous friends, especially Ms.Midas and her Zero Waste household, whose steaming compost piles fueled our interest, and have kept the fires burning.