Composting is a fantastic way to get greener, both inside and outside your home!

Here are some resources from Illinois Extension with tips for home composting, garden use, and manure composting.  The home composting link has an excellent list of items that are compostable (fruit and veggie scraps, hair, lint, grass clippings), and items that should not be composted (charcoal, meat or dairy products, cat litter).

For our own composting, we have an inside collection spot and three outside locations where we collect it.  Once the compost has broken down, we have a great addition to our backyard garden!

Full Circle Compost Bin

Inside, we use a Full Circle Fresh Air Compost Collector (Amazon example link), with compostable bags. We do like how this is easy to use, enclosed enough to keep out on the counter, and doesn’t allow any smells to permeate into the air.  The bags can leak, however, and they do not break down as fast as we would like.  We also use old coffee containers or other lidded containers for food that we can throw to our backyard chickens.

Outside we have three areas to throw compost. First, the chickens.  We feed them organic scraps and leftover fruits and veggies as well as egg shells.  They also like the occasional stale bread or crackers.  All other compost goes in either the compost ball (similar to this: Amazon example link), which we salvaged from someone’s garbage pile and repaired; or into our compost pile, which is just a large square made from re-used pallets, along our garage.  The compost ball has the benefit of being enclosed and easily rotate-able, as well as an excellent heat-collector, so the compost breaks down very quickly.  In the compost pile, we must frequently turn the compost so that it continues to break down.

Composting in the home reduces landfill contributions and produces something great (compost fertilizer for your backyard garden) out of things that we don’t need anymore! It’s a fantastic and easy way to green up your lifestyle.

Check out our blog for other ways to have a greener home and check your local businesses that can help you along the way!

5/31/15