Please do let us know how it goes! We’d love to make something useful from our kitchen waste!

Thanks for the amazingly detailed explanation of the issues surrounding composting. This is really a topic that we keep coming back to unsuccessfully, to the point that we don’t know which way to go with it anymore. As you probably know from Episode 20, we failed in repeated attempts to establish a mushroom garden, so that’s out, we’re not sure we have the space (or the proper temperatures) for vermi composting or more traditional methods, and yet we see how much of our garbage could be turned into something useful if we just had a winning strategy.

Successful composting using thermophilic organisms requires a fairly delicate balance of air, moisture, nitrogen (your green waste), and carbon (your brown waste) in an environment that promotes heat and moisture retention and provide enough buffer to keep pests away.

This is hard to do below a half-cubic yard of compost, in my experience.

Vermi composting greens (with worms) and fungi composting browns is probably a better way to go in an apartment than in a setting with outdoor space.

Remember that you want moisture like a wet (not sopping) sponge, and fresh air.. So you need to compost in a container twice as big as it seems you need so that you can roll or turn it to promote growth and aeration. Always chop your waste greens to promote quick composting. If your compost has too many greens you’ll get bacterial growth (which you’ll smell) and you need to add more carbon (and perhaps less water) which can be in the form of dampened shredded newspapers. Never add anything dry to your compost reactor.

An outdoor compost reactor will naturally acquire a fungi -> thermophile -> red worm transition. If you have a buddy that has an outdoor compost heap see if you can grab a couple handfuls of compost after it’s gone past it’s hot cycle. It will have red worms and fungi and thermophiles in it that you need, provided it’s a well developed compost.

We really don’t have any good ideas on composting in an apartment. I wish we did! This is a general, four-alarm call for input!

No problem with the mention. We love your blog, and thinking about the big, personal issues like you do really reminds us about what’s important when we pick a project. Fair is fair, though…now it’s your turn to pass the award on. *wink*

I’m curious about your composting…you might make some converts of us here– how much of your kitchen waste do you compost, how much compost does this end up making, and how big is your garden? We’d like consider composting, because we doubt we could make enough oyster mushrooms to cover every compost-able in the kitchen, but we’re concerned about ending up with too much compost to support our small container gardens.

Could you tell us more?

We try to tell Zamis what a star he is. Mostly, he seems interested in jumping in our laps, though, and the camera is just an addition to that.