People that
live in the cities are more than likely not going to
believe that they have the option of growing their
very own compost from within the confines of their
home. If gardening is a hobby of yours, yet you
believe that you could not garden from your apartment
or
house, let me help you change
your mind. By purchasing a few containers at your
local convenience store and creating your very
own home composting system that can be set up in your
closet, you will be well on your way to achieving
your gardening dream in your urban area no matter
where you live. Here is a simple solution that will
show you how to create a composting system in your
home.
The first thing that you will need is some kind of a space
in your house that you do not regularly access that can be
used for storage of one or two containers. These containers
will be like large Tupperware containers, about 1 foot
tall, by 18 inches high, by two feet in length. In these
containers you will place a sizable amount of dirt, some
composting material which we will talk about later,
newspaper, water, and some red worms.
The other thing you will need is an ample source of organic
material that either comes from your neighbors across the
hallway or street, or, if you have a large family, right
from your kitchen table. If you are a coffee drinker, all
the better. You can use coffee grounds, your uneaten food
scraps, and your daily newspaper to get yourself
started.
The first thing you will need to do is line the bottom of
your large containers with some newspaper. Next, you will
need to add some soil or bedding makes with some kind of
organic food scraps and perhaps a little peat moss. This
should come up about halfway to the top of the container.
Next, you will want to add to red worms. Make sure they are
covered slightly by a layer of wet bedding and then on top
of that add your organic waste. You will also want to add
supplemental moisture if the bedding is too dry (it should
resemble a wet, wrung out sponge) and mix the soil up a bit
with your hand in order to get proper aeration throughout
the soil for the worms.
Before you take your containers into your storage area,
make sure that you have punched holes in various areas of
the container near the top and on the lid so that the worms
have air. You already ran your fingers or some kind of
instrument through the soil to loosen it up so that the
aerobic breakdown of organics may begin. Once you have done
that, take your container or containers into the room you
have created for them, and let the process began.
The type of organic waste you should put on top should be
something like egg shells for calcium, beans for protein,
and common vegetable scraps that you could not finish. You
should never add any kind of dairy products such as cheese
or yogurt and never add any meat products, oils, and fats.
Allow two to three weeks for the worms to process the food
and add some more at that point, always remembering to
aerate the dirt.
You will notice after a few weeks that bedding and scraps
have begun to change into a soft and moist consistency and
that after a few months, depending on your worm population
and initial amount of worms, you should be able to process
a sizable bag of worm generated compost that you can use in
your garden or containers that you have purchased if you
have decided to grow more food in your home. This would
make sense because you are creating fertilizer within your
home and this would simply be a process of waste
transformation.
Once done, you may notice that you have a few more worms.
Over time, you may want to increase the size of your home
composting system and upgrade to four containers to produce
twice as much. Using the same set of guidelines, do the
process over again. The only thing you will need is an
excess source of organic waste in order to perpetuate this
process.
Home composting can be done outside but then it would not
technically be composting within your home. By using
portable bins that are easily stackable, you could utilize
an unused room of your home and actually begin your own
composting business. As the process continues, it will not
have any negative effects because nothing smells bad and
everything is processed in an aerobic manner if done
properly.
More than likely, the home composting idea has limitations
based upon the amount of space you have and your goals as
far as growing crops or plants within the home. You will
probably only need a few bins to sustain enough compost for
yourself on an annual basis and therefore it is more of a
hobby than a business.
If you decide to expand your home composting into a
monetizeable scenario, you will definitely need to move
everything into the garage and make sure that the
temperature stays around 70 degrees so that the breeding
and processing that the worms must do may continue outside
of the confines of the home. Either way, home composting is
a fun activity that helps the environment and will also
generate excess compost or cash for you.