Compost: Coming In From the Cold

A compost pile in winter can too easily look like a garbage pile. No matter how neat it is, not much happens in cold weather. So mounds of old salad, cooked broccoli, and moldy bread just sit. There won’t be odors in winter, but it’s not a pretty sight and may attract dogs, raccoons or other animals.

You can actually compost kitchen scraps in winter, though, by doing it indoors. One way is with worms. You need red worms, which are the kind of worms that live in manure heaps and compost piles and are sometimes sold as fishing bait. Put the worms in a bin with a loose-fitting lid, along with some shredded newspaper and a smidgen of soil. Then feed the worms kitchen waste as fast as they can eat it.

You also can compost indoors without worms. You need three buckets with loose-fitting lids--5-gallon buckets should suffice. Then make a mixture of equal parts dry sawdust and dry soil, with a little limestone added. You could substitute peat moss for the sawdust. Fill one of the buckets with this mixture.

To begin composting, put an inch of dry straw, leaves or shredded newspaper in the bottom of one of the empty buckets. Then dump your kitchen scraps into the bucket, each time you do so covering them with a sprinkling of the sawdust-soil mixture. The mixture will absorb odors and excess moisture. If you have a lot of scraps at once, dump in a little at a time, covering each layer with the sawdust-soil mixture. Chop up large pieces and let water drain from anything that is very wet before you toss it in the bucket. Do not put meat, litter box waste, or anything else that you would not put into your outdoor compost pile into the indoor compost bucket.

When your bucket is full, set it aside and start filling the other empty bucket. By the time the second bucket is full, the contents of the first one will be well on their way to becoming compost. Dump the contents of that first bucket outside on your compost pile, and start filling that bucket again while the second one sits.

Keep the bucket you are filling and the sawdust-soil mixture right in the kitchen. There, warmth hastens decomposition and the whole setup is as convenient as a sink’s garbage disposal or a garbage pail.

For information and supplies related to indoor composting with worms, contact Flowerfield Enterprises, (616) 327-0108.