Composting -- fascinating fun with vegetable scraps

Food and fun are not the only things that come out of my kitchen. In fact, there is also a lot of trash. When you cook a lot at home, you have much more than just take out boxes to dispose of. But veggie peelings, onion skins, that bit of leftover rice that I can never seem to finish all make their way not into my trash can, but into my compost pile.

Now before you start holding your nose and running, realize two things: 1, that it is a petite pile neatly hemmed in with chicken wire at a far corner of the yard, and 2, it's a mix of leaves and veggie stuff, so it's not like it smells like a trash can. But yeah, sometimes it does, and you don't really put your face that close to it, especially in August.

When I started seriously buying more veggies from the produce section instead of the can or the freezer, surprise (!), they come whole. So you have to peel them, remove seeds, ends and cores. My parents had a compost pile growing up, and so I was used to the idea.

But now that I have my own, it's like my own local version of Planet Earth. Don't need time lapse photography of the rain forest floor here, just my leftover jack-o-lantern, slowly caving and changing colors. Or old cabbage leaves that begin to rot in my crisper drawer and then seem to stay perfectly half-rotted for the longest time in the pile under a thin layer of Bradford Pear leaves. It's a fascinating ecosystem that I feed, and then in spring, it feeds me back, all dark and rich and dirt-smelling with only an occasional avocado skin or newspaper shard to recognize.

And the most amazing thing? The size deferential between the amount of stuff I throw in there (asparagus ends alone account for pounds of discards) and how much rich dirt I get out. The breakdown is amazing.

If you're interested in starting your own, anytime is the perfect time:

http://web.extension.illinois.edu/homecompost/building.html
http://eartheasy.com/grow_compost.html
http://gatheringinlight.com/2007/10/15/how-to-start-a-compost-bin-in-the-city-with-little-money/