Reflections on why we compost and apartment-sized composting systems

A couple of weeks ago, I lost use of my right thumb from a dog bite. I’ll get it back eventually, but the interim has been tough—primarily because I am unable to compost until the bone heals from a “dent” where the animal’s tooth hit. It has been a clarifying stretch of time. I do miss composting, even already. Not just the fact of it, but the physical labor. I miss going to the piles, weekly, at the community garden near my house and spending the afternoon turning them from bin-to-bin, hauling heavy buckets, chipping wood, shifting the great bulk of steaming, heaving everything. This is helping me understand that there may be a dimension to small-space composting that isn’t just fear of “the smell.” It’s that without the physical encounter that a full-blown pile provides, it’s hard to get addicted to the practice.

It’s simply not embodied enough.

This observation tracks with my experience managing a team of compost volunteers. The reasons they come—and come back—are not necessarily that they’re environmentalists. Over and over again, the feedback I get is that they like “putting their hands in the earth” and they like “getting a workout.” They like the good earth smell that compost exudes, they like touching worms and getting dirty, and they like working up a sweat. It’s difficult to translate those types of benefits into apartment-sized composting.

So, I’ve been using my downtime to tinker around in my apartment. I’m trying to come up with new ways to compost indoors. The constraints are time, square footage, smells, and rats. The opportunity is any single method that might convince apartment-dwellers that they can compost without purchasing a $500 device. The one-bag solution outlined in The Rodale Book of Composting, which calls for storing your food scraps with alfalfa in a large plastic bag that you “roll around” weekly sounds nice, but I’ve been curious how well it actually works. Any bag of compost that is sealed up and kept under the sink seems like it would struggle to develop the microbial community required for swift and efficient decay.

I am currently experimenting with a two bucket system that involves food scraps, saw dust, and “turning” the compost from one bucket into the other at intervals. I have a nook in my kitchen where the buckets fit nicely, so this works for me. I’m also one person, living alone, who’s primary food waste is “coffee” and if you drink a lot of coffee, you’re going to end up with an aromatic compost. My pile has a soft, earthy smell already. It makes the kitchen nice. No bugs or rats so far. Although the true results remain to be seen, I think the key ingredient for getting this set up going was inoculating the first batch of food scraps and sawdust with some finished compost from the garden where I work. I added two cups to a five gallon bucket.

Here are the basic ingredients for this set up:

• Two, five gallon buckets with lids

• Bag of sawdust - I sourced mine from a wood shop on my block

• Food scraps (your own)

• 2 cups of finished compost - preferably from a local garden vs store bought

I lay an inch of sawdust at the bottom of the bucket with the two cups of finished compost. I added what food scraps I had. Covered them with sawdust. Closed the bucket. From then on, each time I had food scraps, I added them to the bucket, and then covered them with a handful of sawdust. If the mixture looks dry to my eye, I water it a bit from the same watering can I use for my plants. Every 10 days or so, I turn the mixture from one bucket to another.

I’ll be curious to see how this works. It certainly still doesn’t provide the “outdoorness” of my other compost piles, nor the workout, but it’s proving to be an effective and manageable solution that is, also, thankfully cheap. Plus, it works better for me than a bag, because buckets are less prone than plastic bags to spilling and tearing. I’m aware that it’s not particularly aesthetic, but it does actually make compost—whereas the aforementioned $500 devices absolutely do not. If buckets aren’t for you (fair), I’ve written at length about other options for indoor composting, primarily Bokashi, which calls for fermenting your food scraps, and worm bins. There are options for each that are nice-looking, albeit expensive. I refuse to link because “non-aesthetic composting” is a hill I hope to die on.

Anyway, I’m very curious to know if folks out there have tried any indoor composting set ups. What worked and what didn’t? Did you buy one of those fancy devices? How did you feel about it? Did you make up your own solution, like me? If you got this far in the email, hit reply and let me know.

Miss you and miss compost.

Love,

Cass