A Guide to Composting for Newbies

This morning's coffee grounds....In they go. Eggshells get dumped in, too. Orange rinds, bread crusts, leftover oatmeal, lettuce on its way to dying, all of it gets added to the pile of food scraps kept in an air-tight former cat food bucket, stored under the sink. At the end of the week the bucket will get hauled out back to the compost bin. In about five months we will have our own organic compost for our garden. Yay!

When my husband and I bought our house last spring we wanted to make it our goal to begin learning how to grow our own food, clean and organic. Living in my cute little house in Tallahassee while attending FSU initiated the grow-your-own intrigue, but I had no space. Neither did I while living in a tiny apartment in Orlando. After I got hitched I thought I could start something small in the back yard of our seaside rental. I had glorious romantic notions of gardening on a breezy sunny afternoon, bringing in deliciously plump tomatoes gathered in my apron and whipping up a fabulous...something. We never were able to get the garden started in the sandy patch of yard, but I did learn a lot. For one, watermelon will grow anywhere there's some sand and sun. And lavender doesn't do well on a kitchen windowsill in a house by the beach, especially if you forget to water it routinely.

Our desire for a garden isn't just a romantic idea or frugal option; we're looking for the health and environmental benefits of organic gardening as well. By growing our own produce and buying local, we can control a variety of factors that impact us and the world around us: whether pesticides are used, traveling (length of time produce is in a truck, gas usage, emissions), hormone use, and how animals or produce are raised, just to name a few. Going green, buying organic, buying local, growing your own, eliminating chemicals and toxins are all big words in today's society. The concern of global warming and the realities of technology, disappearing non-renewable resources, and a growing smaller earth seems to have made gardening and farming popular again.

Although, if you know me, you'll know I never do anything out of popularity! Maybe this desire to work the land comes out of some innate return-to-my-roots type of thing. After all, I am the child of "those northerners." My dad's family has a long history of farming and acreage and growing and canning and all those old-fashioned practices that have suddenly become in vogue again.

My little family begins with composting. Food and yard scraps - a thrilling thought! Ah! The smell of fresh compost in the morning! It seems there are three main ways of going about this composting business: slow and easy, vintage, and active. Slow and easy is the route we're taking, though vintage is supposedly easier and active is supposedly quicker. But, since the slow and easy method uses one bin, and one bin is all we have, that's what we're going with.

So what do we do, exactly? In my sink I keep a little bowl of some sort and put all the orange peels, eggshells, apple cores, bread crusts, tea bags, whatever isn't an animal or dairy product into it as I'm washing dishes (we're one of those lucky families without a dishwasher). At the end of the day my husband takes the bowl and the coffee grounds I so sweetly left in the French press and dumps it all into the little bin under the sink. I don't touch it because it's gross. And smelly when you open the lid. Like I said earlier, we use an old cat food bucket. I suppose anything will do as long as it's air-tight, but we're big on re-purposing. Then, once a week he empties the bucket into the compost bin we keep in the back yard. He buries all the food with yard clippings and other grassy things and gives it a good mix. So far it doesn't have an odor and we haven't had any problems with animals. That's pretty much it! So danged easy.

Now we just need some seeds to plant and then our garden can be officially started. Much to my surprise, there are a variety of vegetables fit for late winter planting. Beans, Broccoli, Carrots, Cauliflower, Celery, Collards, Cucumbers, Endive, Escarole, Kale, Lettuce, Mustard, Onions, Parsley, Peas, Peppers, Pumpkins, Rhubarb, Romaine, Spinach, Squash, Strawberries, Tomatoes, Turnips, Watermelons...just to name a few! I'm really not sure what it is we will be planting in the coming weeks, but I am looking forward to it. After so many years of buying produce from who knows where I will finally be able to say I grew it myself. I know where this lettuce leaf came from, what was used to grow it, and how long ago it was picked. Doesn't that just give you a shiver of pride and anticipation?

Of course, now we have a dilemma of wanting to plant and our compost not being ready. Maybe we will switch to an active method after all.

With the creation of our compost bins and discovery of local farms, I'm looking forward to our family's endeavors in growing, "greening," and becoming healthier.