Composting

Lizzi asked about composting. I'll post first about what we do, and then about some things I've heard you can do in an apartment situation. So here's my compost mechanism:



What do you mean you don't have a 120 gallon aquarium with a 5 pound garbage disposal with claws and a fondness for biting fingers?

Ok, in reality, Terabyte gets first pick of the veggie scraps, but the rest go into the compost pile. We have a little can in the kitchen which stores the scraps up for a few days, then we dump it outside. This is particularly handy in winter when we don't want to go outside everyday to add scraps.



You'll notice we're pretty lazy composters. No fancy rotating bins for us. No adding worms, no thermometers and water gauges. We dump stuff on, and fancy that, it composts. My neighbor seemed kinda surprised by this concept. :) Once in a while, we turn it, and when we water the garden, we add some water to the pile. Based on the size of our worms, we're doing ok.

To prevent it from smelling, we just add only veggie scraps and yard waste. As long as you don't add any meat or sauces or anything beyond plant matter, it's fine. There's a fair amount of dirt in there, and we turn it every couple of weeks to get the scraps to the inside of the pile and bring the dirt on the top.

We also try to keep a 50-50 mix of greens(fresh plant matter) to browns(dried leaves). Supposedly this is a good balance for soil, but I think it also prevents it from smelling.