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Read moreCompost: Nature’s Magic Trick
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When you compost, you’re keeping “trash” out of a landfill, where it would have otherwise gone to die and produce a bunch of methane. You’re enriching your soil and bolstering healthy plants. Composting is like a slow motion version of that magic trick when the magician (nature) puts the cloth over the empty hat (food and yard scraps) and manages to pull out a live rabbit (finished compost). It’s pretty wild, really. You mix stuff together and sit back while nature does what she does best…improves things.
What Composting Looks Like for Us
We have a compost can that sits under our kitchen sink. I regularly jam stuff in here that our chickens won’t or shouldn’t eat…coffee grounds, tea bags, egg shells, onion peels, celery ends, and apple cores. (Fun fact: apple seeds contain cyanide. Don’t feed them to your birds.)
My husband Aaron uses a leaf shredder to chop up the fallen leaves in our yard. By shredding the leaves before combining everything in the pile, the compost pile will take less time to finish and be easier to flip/aerate. (Check out the compost flipping video at the bottom of this post!)
We combine our kitchen scraps with shredded leaves (carbon) and chicken poo (nitrogen) in a homemade compost bin made from t-posts and wire fencing, but you can find a bunch of prefabricated compost bins online.
Then we cover the compost pile with a tarp, which is held down with bricks. The tarp helps to keep the moisture level right where it composts best, the dampness of a wrung-out sponge.
We monitor the temperature of our compost heaps. (As you can see in the photo below, the ideal temperature range is between 150°F and 160°F, and we’re killin’ it at a solid 154°F!)
After about five weeks, we’re able to apply our finished compost to our garden beds.
How We’re Failing Better
We still throw too much away. It’s hard to avoid waste in our package-happy world. We don’t pretend to have all of the answers, but we’d argue composting is definitely a step in the right direction.