Confessions of a Newbie Composter

I know this isn’t a usual type of DIY post, but I’m hoping my experience getting started as a composter will be helpful to any of you who might be thinking about it – I know when I was researching composting it’s really easy to find experts to overwhelm you with info and not as easy to find people to talk about the day to day experience. So this is a little bonus post in celebration of Earth Day and because right now in the US, individual actions to reduce waste are still actions we can take regardless of what environmental regulations get struck down by the current government.

I was interested in composting for years, even while I lived in a tiny apartment with no outdoor space in NYC. I routinely found myself frustrated by the amount of trash (both organic and inorganic) we had to throw out because it wasn’t recyclable through the city’s programs and we never seemed to live in a building that signed up for the city’s compost program. I came very close to setting up a worm composting station in the one apartment kitchen we had that actually had a spare corner for it, but unfortunately we had to move out of that apartment unexpectedly and our next apartment, the one we’d live in until we left the city, had a closet sized kitchen that barely fit our standard appliances, let alone any extra items like a compost station.

So when we got to Chicago and I had outdoor space and a garden, I immediately started researching outdoor composters.  The amount of info out there is, quite frankly, overwhelming and is increasing by the day as interest grows – unfortunately a lot of it now is made by sites that sell composting gear themselves and so their info has an underlying sales pitch to it. I did find a website by someone who was just a composting enthusiast which actually walked through the pros and cons of each type of composting, but it’s been buried in the search engine under piles of gardening supply stores now (if I ever find it again I’ll post it here).

I went into my research planning to do cold composting in a corner of our yard with a covered compost container to keep animals out (Chicago has a serious rat problem – my neighborhood also has a raccoon that likes to poke through people’s trash from time to time and some outdoor cats). However, I found some indications that, in areas with rat issues, a compost tumbler is better because it is elevated and completely enclosed. Additionally, cold composters are usually set on the soil itself, which would require me to steal some of the minimal planting space in our tiny yard, while a tumbler could sit on the concrete slab supporting our deck. I ended up buying this FCMP tumbler after finding it on multiple “best composter” lists (this same model is sold by a lot of stores and the prices do vary a bit so shop around).

Yes we need to sweep down here. It keeps raining every day we have planned to do yard work.

At the same time, I also purchased a countertop compost pail to collect kitchen scraps. I can’t find the exact one I purchased but it is a stainless steel pail, with two carbon filters in the lid to help control odors and there are many versions of this type of pail out there. Our current kitchen countertop has a corner between the sink and our cutting board that was a perfect place to put it, right at hand if one of us has been chopping vegetables or if I’m cleaning out my French press and need to dump the coffee grounds.

Honestly, this it the perfect place for this pail — this corner was kind of dead space, anyway.

We’ve been composting for a year now. It’s been surprisingly easy to integrate this into our daily kitchen tasks – the only tricky part is when it’s time to dump the pail into the tumbler in the dead of winter, I sometimes let the pail get a little fuller than it should so I can go out when it’s in the 30s instead of single digits (you do have to stand there for a few minutes). Though I won’t know if the compost we produced seems to be affecting our garden until later in the growing season, here are a few things I’ve learned and observed that surprised me.

The smell is pretty minimal – most of the time.  Part of this could be that the kitchen pail is always predominately coffee grounds (which help absorb odor) and also that the outdoor compost doesn’t get that hot (more on that in a bit), but most of the time you really don’t smell either the indoor pail or the outdoor tumbler when they are closed.  Yes, when dumping the pail into the tumbler you might catch a whiff of rotting plant material but except in the height of summer it’s really not that bad.  The one exception is if we’ve added a lot of eggshells to the kitchen pail it will sometimes have a little extra punch for a few days – but only when the pail lid is off.

Also a quick tip for cleaning out the pail when you empty it – because we put a lot of coffee grounds in the pail, dumping it into the tumbler can get pretty messy.  I have a personal bias against compost pail liners – my main reason for composting is to reduce waste, so I don’t want to buy additional material that then needs to be composted -- so that’s not an option for me. We keep unbleached paper that we want to compost in a separate recycling bin in our pantry, so I just grab some paper every time I empty the pail and use it to scrape out the pail – then the paper can go straight into the tumbler.

It's hard to get the compost hot enough, but there are workarounds. Your pile needs to maintain a temperature of 130 degrees F (54 degrees C) to kill most weed seeds. A couple months in, I started to suspect that the compost tumbler wasn’t getting very hot, so I bought a compost thermometer; a manual thermometer with a long probe so it can get the temps in the middle of the compost. As I suspected, the compost doesn’t get anywhere close to 130.  So for this reason I do exclude fruit pits or weeds or anything I’d be upset to find growing randomly in my garden just to be on the safe side. 

I haven’t taken any compost out -- and yet I haven’t filled the tumbler. The outdoor tumbler gets not only the kitchen pail contents, but yard waste (even not putting weeds in, we have tons of tree leaves, trimmings from the actual plants in the garden, old potting soil, etc.), unbleached paper and compostable packaging and anything else that is biodegradable and I know doesn’t have nasty chemicals in it. And yet despite everything I’ve put in both sides of the tumbler, I have yet to reach a point where I have to stop putting waste in until I take compost out.  It’s really astonishing to realize how fast everything breaks down even in a too-cold pile like mine.

Last fall I also decided to set up a separate, open compost pile for leaves and branches from our backyard tree, because we just get an overwhelming amount (I use the leaf compost more for mulch to protect our beds and plants in the winter, so I don’t need it to break down as far, either). So I’m not putting everything we could possibly compost in the tumbler, but I have still put pounds and pounds of waste that would otherwise have gone in our garbage in this tumbler and watched it reduce to a fraction of itself. Honestly if all my composting ever accomplishes is keeping that much waste out of a landfill it would still be worth it.

This year I’ll be finally taking some compost out to mix in with the beds as I plant our first seeds. Perhaps next year’s Earth Day post will be about whether I’ve noticed a difference using my own compost in the garden.

Have you tried composting? Was there anything that surprised you about the experience?