The People's Recycling... is Composting
One of our one year old West Maui Green Cycle style compost piles on the farm, cooking with life. The style we learned at last year’s conference has brought us to the next growing season. The material will be sifted and added to planters for summer produce. When I scratched into this pile, there were hundreds of visible insects scattering for cover. That is a very good sign that the compost is mature and cool enough for the garden.
What is the people’s recycling? It is called composting. Although it can take on many names and forms, taking otherwise landfilled organics such as kitchen scraps, composting is the only form of recycling that we can do all on our own. We may not be able to melt down aluminum or glass and press it into a new product, but we can layer yard leaves with kitchen scraps and feed our gardens and ourselves.
Left to right that’s me, Alissa La Chance, Dirt Rich Compost (Columbia Falls, MT), Gwenn Nolan, Mother Compost (Philadelphia, PA), and Lisa Daugherty, Juneau Composts (Juneau, AK).
My Compost 2024 crew taught me a lot about the business side of composting. From curbside collections to selling custom blended potting mix their operations are compelling models for a growing composting industry. These women, like so many others, are working tirelessly to bring about change in their communities while providing topnotch service and making compost worthier of your dollar. Not pictured are Melissa Tashjian, Compost Crusader (Milwaukee, WI) and Jennifer Mastalerz, Bennett Compost (Philadelphia, PA). I feel lucky to be part of a really great and supportive composter network.
Last month, I had the opportunity to go to my second United States Composting Council (USCC) Conference in Daytona Beach, FL. There I heard the stories of countless composers. I was able to meet with my USCC mentor, Amy Freeman Rosa, in person and see some familiar faces. The experience is invaluable for continuing the journey here in Montgomery. I attended the master mind with a community focused group out of DC that has several initiatives, the Institute for Local Self Reliance. Their work, alongside hundreds of composers across the country and globe, has put composting in the national budget. It was in that room that somebody reminded me that there is a meager 5% of organics being composted currently. We have a long way to go but the prospect of moving the needle is exciting and we have the capacity to make this change with very little investment.
Sara Covata, Amy Freeman Rosa, and Lindsay with others helped to define a really cool statewide composting community for me. The Michiganders are cooking up some great compost. Sara is a composter with the Bowers School Farm. Amy Freeman-Rosa is with Soil and Water Conservation District. And Lindsay is with a municipal waste facility that retrofitted one of the trucks in their fleet to run a weekly compost route to collect household food scraps to be composted next-door to the landfill.
Kale growing in one of the raised beds at Eat South glistens with frost. It was side dressed with some of our compost back in the late fall. How does it look?
There is a lot of attention going into changing the way we handle our resources, including the humble apple core and spent coffee grinds laying in our garbage bin. These odds and ends are waiting for someone to rescue them and give them a new life. Otherwise they are entombed in the landfill where they become part of a much bigger problem. Without oxygen, the byproduct of the organics in our landfills is methane gas. Some landfills even capture this gas and use it in place of other fuel. Although better than doing nothing, organics really do us a whole lot more good when they are processed in a compost pile and turned into the single best fertilizer to grow better produce and increase the capacity of the soil to weather storms.
Over the last year, our little community compost has diverted 1684 pounds of food scraps from the landfill. That adds up to the weight of 7 refrigerators. And when you compare to landfilling the food and consider resulting emissions, is the equivalent of not driving an average car 1309 miles. When we add the finished compost to the garden, the cycle begins again. The soil becomes even more robust and has the capacity to sequester more carbon from our atmosphere while growing tastier healthier produce. Living soils literally keep soil grounded, create pathways for water to soak in instead of running off, and create beauty all around us. So let’s add life to the soil, and take recycling into our own hands, through composting.
Become a part of the composter community. We are here to help.
Contact me with any questions.
334-422-9331 or compost@eatsouth.org
Winter cover crop of peas, vetch and wheatgrass keeps the soil happy between crops in our raised beds. Cover cropping with legumes like vetch and peas adds nitrogen to the soil. With the added bonus of delicious pea tendrils. With a goal of good soil health, keeping the ground covered ranks very high on the farmer’s priorities. Without anything growing, the soil life decreases dramatically and you have to start over. This bed will be cleared, unveiling a rich living soil, and a 1/2 inch compost will be raked into the bed before transplanting the summer vegetables. Sometimes additional soil ammendments such as blood meal, kelp meal, fish emulsion and bone meal are also used depending on the planting plan.