When it comes to food scraps, I guess I’m one of the hard-core types. I save them when I travel to take home, give to a fellow gardener or dig them into the ground somewhere. I keep a baggy with me for when we go into restaurants and I have the cheek at dinner parties to ask my host for their scraps if they’re destined for the garbage can. I instinctively scan the schoolyard for half-eaten fruit or carrot sticks lying around and I can’t walk by an apple or banana peel on the sidewalk without picking it up. I pick up compostables from a number of places in town, yet it still grieves me to think of what ends up in the landfill. At home, every crumb goes into my composting bucket, along with liquids such as tea, coffee, juices, water from cooking vegetables, expired soups, etc. There’s no sense of waste when a meal isn’t finished or I discover an item in the fridge that should’ve been eaten a week ago, because if we can’t use it, the microbes and worms sure can. They’ll turn that vitamin and mineral-rich smorgasbord of food scraps into wonderful black soil, full of nutrients and castings for my plants to enjoy.
Besides my yard waste bins, I keep a separate, two-sided bin for food scraps for critter control measures. To camouflage any smells that may attract unwanted visitors and also increase the volume and diversity of nutrients, I keep a supply of either sawdust, shredded leaves or untreated grass to layer in over the scraps every time I dump a bucket in. Clean wood ashes are great too, but be sure not to make the same mistake as my husband, who dumped in some live coals and set the bin on fire. Just about anything organic can be composted, but some items such as meat and dairy (small amounts are OK), tend to not only attract animals and scavenging birds, but also can carry disease organisms and bacteria and should be left out. All food waste composts over time, but chopping up the bigger pieces as well as items such as thick orange peels or tough avocado skins, will help speed up and aid the digestion process.
It’s always important to have the right moisture content in the bin, so if I can’t use the hose in winter, I just add some water to my food bucket before dumping. I have no lids on my bins, so I use rubber mats as a cover and pin the corners down with pieces of granite or rocks. Between that and layering with other materials, no smells advertise my food scrap stash and I have no critter problems. When there’s enough to fill one side, I flip it over into the adjacent bin and start another. The finished black soil is then applied directly onto my garden beds.
The nutrient value of your food scraps has a direct bearing on the nutrient levels of your finished compost. Foods grown organically, along with materials found in nature such as leaves, will have a much higher amount of vitamins and minerals than chemically grown foodstuffs. This is another good reason to layer a variety of materials in with your food scraps. The Gaia College message is “feed the soil, which feeds the plant.” It’s no different with us and other animals – the more variety of nutrients we provide for our bodies, the healthier and stronger we become to resist any disease or illness. Applying nutrient-rich compost to your garden beds will provide the best possible defence for your plants as well as increase the richness of your soil.
The journey from the farmer’s field to the food table requires many stages of handling and trucking, and plenty of contaminants end up on our fruit and vegetables. On top of that, my brother once worked in a food warehouse and said that everything was coated with a fine layer of dirty dust, as well as rodent droppings and dead insects scattered about. That has enough of a “yuck factor” for me, so I always take the time to soak my fruits and vegetables in the sink with soapy water before I put them away. This also reduces the amount of contaminants that goes into my composting bin and ultimately into the soil, let alone my body.
In a world where so many are living in famine conditions, us humans chuck out approximately a third of the food that’s grown and prepared. If we’re not going to use it, the least we could do is turn it back into the soil to grow food in once again. Composting your food scraps is easy and gratifying and takes little time and effort to produce, so make it a New Year’s resolution to start composting all those wonderful food scraps and not let them go to waste.
