Making Good Use of Garbage!

Composting is collecting kitchen scraps and leaves and putting them into a bin or a pile. If you don't have a yard or want to do this is the winter, then you can use red worms, and even make a little profit from it. Composting is easy and saves landfill space and tax dollars. It is a hands-on way to eliminate needless waste, beautify your landscape, and enjoy a more productive garden with compost - nature's own slow-release fertilizer.

Composting Benefits:

• Reduces the cost of getting rid or your garbage
• Reduces the stink in your garbage cans
• Reduce global warming; food decomposing in the landfills produces methane gas
• Saves space for longer-lived landfills
• Produces great soil amendment for your garden
• Returns nutrients to the soil such as potassium, phosphorus, magnesium, zinc, manganese, iron and boron
• When added to soil compost helps promote root development, enhances retention or water and nutrients, and makes the soil easier to cultivate
  
• When used on the surface of the soil as mulch, compost reduces rainfall run-off, decreases water evaporation from the soil, and helps to control weeds
• Composting with worms is great for science projects and a great classroom activities for the whole year

Unfortunately sometimes you can run into problems with composting, but here are some cures:

Pile smells rotten and/or attracts files

• Too wet and/or non-composting items are present. Turn, add dry-woody materials, cover pile from heavy rains and/or remove grease, etc and turn

Compost is damp and warm only in the middle

• Pile is too small. Get more material, mix old ingredients into a new pile

Pile is not composting

• Too dry and/or too much dry woody material. Moisten till slightly damp and/or turn, add fresh green materials or organic nitrogen fertilizer

Pile is damp and sweet smelling but won't heat up

• Lack of nitrogen. Mix in nitrogen source such as fresh grass clipping, fresh manure, bloodmeal or ammonium sulfate

Rodents in pile

• Food watses in open bin, hole larger than 1/4 inch or non-composting items present. Turn compost and rodent-proof yourbin and remove meat, grease, etc. and turn

Here are 2 different ways to make your own compost with your kids help.

One way is to use red worms. These worms can eventually be sold to make a little extra cash during fishing season as live bait, since they will be nice and plump, but you will need to replace them to continue with your composting. Just a side note, worms can be rather noisey, so you may want to put them some place that won't disturb you.

Another method for composting is using carbon and nitrogen mixture outside. This method is fueled by millions of microscopic organisms (bacteria, fungi) that take up residence inside you compost pile. They continuously devour and recycle it to produce a rich organic fertilizer and valuable soil amendment.

This is a good way to eliminate more of your actual trash when you are recycling other items. Right now, yard and kitchen waste make up about 30% of the waste stream in the USA. Many states in the USA have already stated goals and/or legislative mandates to drastically reduce the volume of waste being sent to the landfills. In about 10 years, composting will most likely become as common as recycling aluminum cans.