This year really reconnected me with nature.
For over a decade there was a compost bin in corner of my parents backyard.
I decided I was going to grow a proper garden this year and also start composting.
It's been nearly an entire year of composting but the true experiment is....what happens in the winter?!
I think one of the things that prevents people from composting in the winter is that it is cold, snowy and more inconvenient.
My solution is to have a proper system in place:
1) collect your kitchen scraps as usual. Usually people have small organic waste containers that fill up every few days. In the spring summer and fall it's easy to just run out to the back yard and dump it in the compost bin but in the winter you'll likely want to make fewer trips
2) I got a bucket and I got a gamma seal lid for it so that its more convenient. I put this in a corner of the laundry room. When the little organic bin is full in the kitchen, I just dump it into the larger bin in the laundry room. The game seal prevents any unwanted smells. When the bin gets full...every 1.5 weeks or so...that's when you can take it out to the composter.
3) your pile may just freeze over...and that's okay. Keep adding to it and in the spring you will be well on your way.
4) I'm not too crazy about to ratios In my compost. For me, there are 2 parts to my compost... Kitchen scraps which I refer to as green waste. And then there is brown waste.
From spring to fall your brown waste will be stuff from your lawn like leaves, stocks of plants after harvest and other plan matter.
In the winter these things are frozen or hard to find. I add paper shreds to my compost.... literally shredded paper. Egg cartons. Any bio degradable packing peanuts, or packaging paper, now certain places are using compostable food containers.
Osmow's here in Scarborough Ontario uses these compostable containers and I am proud of them for that.
The company Socialite Beauty uses biodegradable packaging peanuts that dissolve in water. It's fantastic.
I do about 60 percent green stuff and 40 percent brown stuff.
The decomposition might be slow.
The cold/thaw cycles will help break things down.
Nature has billions of years to figure this out. When the season transitions back to wamer weather you will have a nice heap that is ready to do it's thang.
Compost. Don't let the cold weather stop you. Stop exporting carbon off of your property.
