Composting.

This goes hand in hand with my garden idea. I did a lot of reading about composting. I always felt so guilty throwing away food scraps. My mom composted.

I discussed the idea with my husband. He always needs just a little convincing about my crazy schemes. He was okay with it... but really wanted a tumbler for the compost bin, which is what we got.


It is rather large. But you just put all of your compostable items in the top. The lid screws on and off and you spin it and least daily. I was so overwhelmed at first with the percentage of "nitrogen items vs. carbon items." There's a certain %age that they recommend, but my instructions said just to try estimating at 50% of each. So, all the food scraps are the Carbon (or Green) items. I was worried that I would be able to come up with enough of the nitrogen (or Brown) items.

But to my surprise, you can throw newspaper in there, cardboard boxes that your food comes in i.e. cereal, pasta, etc. Coffee grounds and filters. Egg shells. Corn cobs. It's so nice to have a place to put all of these in rather than the trash. It's literally cut the amount of trash that I put out each week by half.

My husband was also worried about the prospect of the compost smelling badly. Even when you open up the top on a hot, humid day... it simply smells like soil.




I took a picture of what the inside of my bin looks like. I've been collecting things for about 4 weeks or so. At some point, I'm going to have to stop adding things so that this can completely turn to soil. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my compostable items then, but I'm sure I'll come up with something.

Here's a link to the place that I bought my bin. It was on the more expensive side. You can find cheaper bins, but this was one of the most inexpensive tumblers that I could find. It was a gift to myself with my tax refund money. haha

http://www.beamingsun.com/market/homegarden/uct9.php