#1 Adventures in Composting

To get to the part of the story where I can tell you how I got to the decision of starting a compost bin requires a lot of twists and turns in my crazy brain, but here goes: I'm sitting in church thinking about how I'm finally graduating from nursing school.  I'm thinking this is going to free up more time for other adventures.  Plus, every semester I make a list of goals that I want to accomplish.  On top of that, New Year's is around the corner so 2012's goals are in need of drafting.  As I'm pondering this I think about how I really want to create an organized system for food storage, but that's a whole other post for later.  This thought leads to me to thoughts of dutch ovening.  Finally I come to the conclusion that it would be really cool to start my own garden, so that I can learn how to grow things for myself, possibly save money on produce, and hopefully grow extra delicious produce compared to store bought.

The only problem?  I know very little about gardening.  Especially here in Las Vegas.  After doing some research I come to realize that this endevour may not save me any money if I have to buy expensive nutrient enriched soil and other things to grow anything.  After picking my dad's brain he mentions off hand that my granny buries all her organic kitchen waste and that makes the dirt much better for growing.

With that little seed planted in my brain, I go back to my computer for research.  Composting is the perfect solution!  It takes 3 months to years to make a good compost pile.  This is the perfect time span, since right now it's winter and I can't plant anything anyway so I can begin making special nutrient rich soil! 

It's actually a really cool process, and I'll give you a run down since I knew almost nothing before researching.  Basically you throw all your yard clippings (grass, leaves, etc.), organic kitchen waste (orange peels, coffee grounds, eggshells, rotten produce, pretty much anything besides meat and grease), and things like shredded paper and sawdust into a compost bin (which I'll get into in a second) and bacteria breaks everything down over time and produces all this nutrient rich stuff you can spread in your garden to make things grow better. You can learn more at this link: Composting 101

I don't want to spend a lot of money doing this so even though specially designed, expensive compost bins are available I wanted a lower tech option.  You can do it like my granny and simply bury the stuff, or create a general heap somewhere in your backyard, but I wanted a way to monitor the progress so I opted for some sort of bin.  After doing a little googling I came upon this site: http://organicgardening.about.com/od/compost/ht/storagecompost.htm

Kevin assisted me in creating my compost bin out of a plastic storage bin.  I found an old, beaten-up bin in the garage AFTER buying one at Wal-Mart (I blame my dad for not telling me). So we decided to use that one instead of the new one.  It's pretty simple, you just have to drill holes about 1 inch apart on every side of the bin including the lid so that the compost can get some oxygen. 

As we were driving away from Kevin's neighborhood, we looked over and discovered this abandoned burlap sack of leaves. Jack. Pot. 

This is the beginning of the organic kitchen waste I'm going to add to it.  According the the Composting 101 site it's better to add a large chunk of material because the bigger the amount the faster the breakdown process happens.

After the bin was completed, we set it outside on top of an intact lid to catch drainage to add back into the compost as needed.  We lined the bottom with the leaves, then poured some water in the bin to jumpstart the process and followed it up with the organic kitchen waste.

 This is what the final product looked like. 

From here I plan to add waste, shredded paper and other things that can be composted. This is a list of 163 Things That Can be Composted. I will also have to go out every 1-2 days to agitate and mix up the contents to speed up the composting process. Hopefully by April I'll have the start of some enriched material for my garden!