Composting - a first attempt.

One of the many things I was excited to do once we moved into a house with a yard was compost. I have always wanted a garden, and composting kind of goes hand in hand with that. Living in an apartment with not so much as a patio space has kept that dream from happening for the last four years. Now we own a house - with a pretty big backyard, with lots of trees and plantlife. We moved too late in the year for me to really start a garden that will flourish during the summer months so we're just getting our land prepared for things that can be planted & will grow in the late summer/early fall months. I've been reading You grow girl to help with the initial understanding of composting and gardening. it's a pretty easy to follow straight to the basics book.


(none of my boys believe in wearing shirts. It's actually a miracle that the oldest is wearing one in this picture)


This being our first attempt at composting we decided to start small, because apparently it is actually possible to mess up a compost pile. In our apartment we had different bins for recycling, now That we live in a house & have trash days recycling is actually mandatory and the city provides the bins. So we took one of our old (apartment sized) recycling bins and decided to give composting a test run in that. baby steps.


We just started out saving our kitchen scraps - fruit & veggies peels, or unwanted raw pieces that didn't end up as dinner. Coffee grounds left over from Karl's daily morning thermos etc. We've been doing a lot of yard maintence due to the fact this yard has been unkempt for over 7 years, so the dry leaves and grass and branches from that have gone into the pile as our "brown layer" with all of the newspaper we used to pack breakables in to move. (that's also recycling - right?)

We'll have to see how it goes over the next couple weeks - and hopefully we don't end up those people that somehow mess up the simple task of having trash basically decompose - that's a natural process from organic trash, so if we mess it up it's pretty bad.