Go Greener, Australia

Last year my husband and I started a compost bin: we wanted to improve the soil in our garden, which is sandy like most of Perth, and stop adding food scraps to landfill.

We bought a standard compost bin from Bunnings. Our local council sells them at a discount, but they have to be picked up during office hours on a weekday and we both work full-time. There are fancier ones available, but ours is just a black tub, no bottom, with a lid. You could easily make your own, or you could try a worm farm, or a Bokashi composter… there’s something to suit everyone.

Our food scraps go in a little covered kitchen bin, which is then emptied into the compost bin every so often. As well as our food scraps, we put in the local newspaper, lawn clippings, and prunings from the garden. We don’t put meat or fat in there, since that attracts vermin. Mostly it smells fine, in an earthy sort of way, and if it doesn’t then we give it a good stir to air it out then chuck in more newspaper.

Composting can get technical if you want to maintain the correct carbon-to-nitrogen ratios and produce lots of compost as fast as possible. If you have a big family or a big garden, you’ll want to look into “hot process composting”. We’ve gone with the lazier method, known as “cold process” (also known as the “chuck it all in and cross your fingers” method) and it seems to be working fine for us.

At any rate, we should soon have some nice compost to dig into the garden, which we can use to try growing some organic vegies. Between the compost bin and the council recycling tubs, our wheelie bin is only half-full each week on bin day, so we’ve definitely reduced the amount of waste we send to landfill. And we’ve managed to re-use (or is it recycle?) our food scraps into useful compost.

More information:
Sustainable Gardening Australia has an article on The Science of Composting. If you want to get technical, Wikipedia has a full explanation of how composting works.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 9:32 pm and is filed under garden, reduce-reuse-recycle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.