Composting is one of the cornerstones of self-sufficiency. It takes household and garden waste and turns it into the giver of life: soil.
If you have a house, you can compost. In fact, you SHOULD compost. Even if you don’t end up using it yourself, most cities have a composting service where they take away your organic waste. You don’t necessarily need a large outdoor space, although that gives you more options. You will save money on waste disposal, and also on buying potting mix and compost!
The basics
First we need to look at the basics of composting. You can’t chuck just anything in there. Each method will have specific dos and don’ts. You also need to add carbon in the form of paper, twigs, sawdust, bark, leaves. And you need to layer these with your home waste. Moisture also needs to be managed and each system has different needs. Here at Little Forge Farm we have the luxury of old animal bedding (straw, hay) and their poos! Horse poo, chicken poo, and rabbit poo, oh my! The poo makes great fertilizer on its own, but can also enrich the compost.
Bokashi
This is an enclosed fermenting method where a special urn and starter mix is used to turn household organics into a useable product. Bokashi is a great system for small gardens, small homes and indoor composting as the lid must stay closed and the smell is trapped. Apparently, you can add anything into a bokashi system! Milk, meat, bones, bread. This is pretty much how we compost, as we are lazy about it. We give as much as we can to the chooks, but there are obviously things they can’t eat. So into the compost it goes!
The compost heap
A traditional outdoor method using moveable wooden pallets to make a square that is built higher each time the compost pile gains height. Obviously you’ll need space outdoors for this, and you’ll need to have ways to prevent vermin from making it their home. You’ll also get a lot of small flies making it their home which can make composting a messy and unappealing task.
If you have a large outdoor space, you could make a windrow of compost (including waste from composting toilets) and cover it with plastic sheets to compost. This takes a bit of work seasonally: turning it over to aerate it, preventing water-logging in winter and preventing combustion in summer. Yes, compost can catch fire so you have to be careful when aerating that you don’t add oxygen to the hot core temperature of your compost heap! If you are going to aerate on a hot day or in summer, have the hose handy to dampen it as you go.
Vermicomposting
You can make your own indoor or outdoor worm farm for little cost. The worms are very efficient converters of organic waste and produce worm pee (liquid) and worm poo (solids). Both can be used to enrich soil. They can be smelly and you have to deal with worms, which can be a bit odd if it’s indoors. I would keep it in the garage, not the house. The best part of this is that the worms do all the work and you don’t have to turn it or aerate the compost. Just lift the lid, add to it and close it up again. The only downside is that worms can’t handle the same food waste as other systems, such as oil, fat, meat, bones, milk products, citrus and spicy food. However they can handle coffee and tea bags, which surprised me!
Our homestead system:
We use three 40 gallon plastic drums with lids, and rotate which one we are putting waste into. I bought a compost accelerator (some fungi or bacteria, I presume) that is sprinkled in water and added periodically. And we layer with paper, leaves, spoiled hay/ straw, bark, wool. I add moisture as needed, but there is no tap at the bottom of these bins, so I don’t want too much liquid. This method is similar to bokashi, but on a bigger scale. It’s also not as wet as vermicomposting and bokashi. When it is ready, we lay out a sheet and upturn the compost, let it dry for a day or two then add to the bottom of raised beds or around the orchard trees.