Composting

As I prepared dinner a few weeks ago, I realized that before the evening was up, I had filled the trash can with food waste: onion tips, lettuce ends, pepper stems, etc. And I had just taken the trash out! Apart from being annoyed that I had to take the trash out again, I was upset because everything in the trash can was organic material that could be composted. My husband and I had talked about composting before, and when the opportunity to be more green during Lent arose, this was the perfect solution.

I jumped online and began to research composting. There’s LOTS of information out there, so sorting through the good, the bad, and the ugly was probably more difficult than the composting itself. Plus composting has lots of great benefits. It:
• Suppresses plant diseases and pests.
• Reduces or eliminates the need for chemical fertilizers.
• Promotes higher yields of agricultural crops.
• Facilitates reforestation, wetlands restoration, and habitat revitalization efforts by amending contaminated, compacted, and marginal soils.
• Cheaply remediates soils contaminated by hazardous waste.
• Removes solids, oil, grease, and heavy metals from stormwater runoff.
• Captures and destroys 99.6 percent of industrial volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) in contaminated air.
• Provides cost savings of at least 50 percent over conventional soil, water, and air pollution remediation technologies.

So, we started our compost pile in a back corner of our garden that usually gets grown over with weeds before I can blink. We had some leaves and other yard waste sitting in our burn pile, so we put that on the bottom. We add to it weekly our food scraps (no meat or fat products, just fruits, veggies, egg shells, coffee/tea), dryer lint, cardboard, and other paper scraps. Since my husband is also a woodworker the sawdust he generates can be added. It takes no time at all – just a consciousness of what can be put in the pile! We added a small stainless steel can to our kitchen that is our compost can so we don’t have to make quite so many trips to the back each day. We simply stir our little pile on a regular basis and the magic of decomposition does the rest. By mid-summer our compost should be ready to be used in our gardens for mulch and soil enrichment!

About the Author: Erika Uthe is a student at Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque. She attended the international climate treaty negotiations last December in Copenhagen through funding provided by Iowa IPL supporters. A blog about her experiences in Copenhagen can be found here.

Next week Iowa IPL board member Ruth Ratliff will be discussing line drying clothes to cut carbon during Lent.