Thinking about trash & compost

(CSA Newsletter: Main Season Week 12)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

The big news in Yamhill County this week was that petitioners successfully gathered enough signatures for a ballot measure concerning the placement of landfills within designated flood plains. As you all probably know, this is timely because our local landfill (sited in a flood plain, next to the Yamhill River) is seeking to expand this year.

Regardless of the outcome of the ballot measure, the news has me thinking about a lot lately about garbage — where it comes from and how we deal with it as a society. Clearly, living in 21st century America is a pursuit that creates waste products. How we deal with those waste products is a question most often addressed only by ‘professionals’ — few individual Americans want to think too hard about where their waste goes once it leaves their residence.

Casey and I have been blessed with a high level of ‘garbage awareness,’ originating from our prior experiences living at Holden Village, a community located in a remote sensitive wilderness area.

Holden Village is located in central Wasington state, up Lake Chelan and 10 miles further into the mountains. Surrounded by wilderness area and national forest, the community has to ‘ship out’ all their waste products themselves: by truck to the lake and then on a commercial barge down lake. Four hundred plus people can create a lot of trash, so the community has dedicated itself to massively reducing the volume of that waste destined for landfills.

To meet this goal, Holden employs a full-time staff member, the ‘Garbologist,’ whose sole job is managing waste. The only waste products that ever reach the landfill from Holden are items that absolutely cannot be dealt with any other way: non-recyclable plastics and biohazard waste. All recyclable items are recycled; non-recyclable paper and non-compostable meats/oils (dangerous to compost in the wilderness because of bears) are burnt in a high-efficiency, low-output incinerator; and food scraps and kitchen waste are composted in a series of well-managed compost bins. (Importantly, Holden Village’s community begins the process by reducing unnecessary waste products as much as possible: re-using one-sided paper, using cloth diapers, eliminating products with excess packaging, etc.)

Living in such an aware community trained Casey and me thoroughly on our own personal waste management procedures. After we married, we set up our own household using these same principles. We eliminated waste by buying food in bulk, using cloth bags at the store, recycling, and composting.

Most people we know recycle, but not everyone is yet on board with household composting. Many of our friends seem daunted by composting — not surprisingly, since extension services offer ‘Master Composter’ courses and entire books cover the topic.

Such extensive courses and books are intended for gardeners who are looking to make their own fertility — composting of home scraps is simple and doable in almost any setting with outdoor space.

Even when we were first living on our own, in a small apartment, we had a little renegade compost pile we shared with a neighbor and stored on the dirt behind the building’s dumpster — it was a humble set-up: a large terra cotta planter pot with a plate for a lid. Every few days, we’d empty our kitchen scrap bucket into the pot, stir it a little with a trowel, add a few leaves , and put the plate back on. Simple, but it worked. We rarely had to empty it, because the volume decreased as the matter broke down. Worms found their way up through the hole and helped the process. Some days, there was a little smell close to the pot (which paled in comparison to the dumpster), but for the most part it was innocuous and no one noticed it was even there.

Many years later, our food scrap compost system at our farm is as simple as ever: a pile near the house that we occasionally turn and add extra ‘carbon’ to in the form of leaves or straw.

Many of our CSA members also have compost bins in their yards, but if you don’t have one yet, we encourage you to think about doing so. Veggie scraps are so highly compostable that there is no reason for them take up room in a garbage dump. But they apparently do: in 2006, 30.6 million tons of biodegradable food scraps went into U.S. landfills!

Unfortunately, when added to a municipal-sized garbage dump, food scraps breakdown slowly and unhealthily in the anaerobic environment, releasing methane — a greenhouse gas 23 times more ‘powerful’ than carbon dioxide. In small oxygen-rich compost piles, food scraps do not create methane.

Hopefully Casey and my humble compost examples will inspire newbie composters to start their own. Here are a few tips for a successful start:

Begin by adding a compost bucket or bin to your kitchen waste disposal area so that composting becomes as easy as using your garbage can. An open container will usually smell less than a closed one (oxygen and air lead to a healthy, non-smelly kind of break-down). We keep an open bucket under the sink — it’s closed away enough that we can’t smell coffee grounds or onion skins, but it doesn’t begin anaerobic (stink!) breakdown.

Choose a location for your outdoor compost pile that is convenient to your kitchen so that you’ll use it, but far enough away that if it does occasionally smell, it won’t become burdensome. If you have room, a pile on the ground is an easy method — perhaps behind a tree or shed so that it’s not as visible. You can also build a simple bin out of wood slats (you can find plans on the Internet). A shovel or pitchfork to is useful for regularly turning the compost in order to introduce more air and aid in aerobic breakdown. Or, you can buy one of the plastic compost bins available at many garden centers that incorporate a ‘spinning’ feature, eliminating the need to manually turn.

Covering your compost pile in the rainy season can be beneficial, as we did with our plate on the terra cotta pot. Many of the purchased compost bins come with a built in cover system, or you can simply position your pile near a shed overhang. Our current pile is open, however, and we’ve had no problems.

Many of the problems present in very large scale composting and landfill systems — such as toxic leaching — are non-existent in household composting systems simply because of the incredibly small scale. So, even though a cover, an impermeable floor, and constant turning is necessary on a large scale, a very small household compost pile will remain healthy and biodegrade readily with very little management.

As far as what to put in your compost: any vegetable-based scraps will biodegrade easily. Eggshells, coffee grounds, breads and grains are also fine. Avoid adding highly processed foods and foods with lots of oils and fats, and meats. We’ve been known to successfully compost very small quantities of all of these, but a compost bin full of fat will not be pleasant. Essentially, a healthy compost bin should reflect a healthy diet: heavy in fresh veggie scraps/trimmings and very light on processed foods, meats, and oils.

If you find yourself with more processed foods and meats than greens, this might be an occasion to examine your diet and eating habits. Do you routinely prepare more food than your family can eat? Do you then throw away leftovers rather than saving and eating them at another meal? Although Casey and I cook with plenty of meats, dairy products and fat, those expensive ingredients usually end up in our bellies rather in the compost. Most of our compost material comes from preparing the meal rather than from the finished product, which is consistent with our values about cherishing the gift of food.

Adding extra carbon sources to your compost pile can help minimize the wetness sometimes attributed to food-based compost systems. Fallen leaves, grass clippings, and straw all make great occasional additions (and are readily available here in Yamhill County). We’ve never been very regular in our turnings and carbon additions, except to respond to the way the pile looks. If it looks wet or has a smell, that’s a signal to turn and/or add carbon.

As far as ‘using’ your compost — that’s entirely up to you. We’ve always found that our compost piles have a way of shrinking and shrinking to fit new additions without too much worry. But occasionally, we’ll abandon a pile to let it fully breakdown without new additions and then spread the resulting dark rich humus under a tree or on a flower bed. If you never add meat or dairy, the fully composted product should also be perfectly safe for adding to a vegetable bed.

Even though it’s simple, the composting process itself is in fact deserving of books, treatises, poetry, and other forms of praise. The miracle is its simplicity and the beauty of natural processes.

Americans have been taught (or sold?) the idea that only professionals can take care of certain regular needs, including waste management. That’s certainly true of non-biodegradable products, but food scraps are something we can all take responsibility for within our own households.

Perhaps someday more American cities will invest in municipal food scrap composting, much like we already have for yard waste with Greenlands. But, until that time, I hope we can learn to manage the easiest part of our daily trash flow.

As participants in the CSA, you are stepping ever closer to the source of your food. Composting it in your yard is a completion of that process, participating in the cycles that allow us to partake of food to begin with: the soil-building microbes and fungi that make life possible.

Embrace the process! Prevent compostable materials from becoming a toxic problem for the environment! Start a compost bin at home! And, when you’re done putting your trimmings into your compost bucket, enjoy this week’s tasty vegetables.

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla