How to Compost in Your Apartment
How to Compost in Your Apartment
Size: The bin measures 18x9x6 inches (width by depth by height), and the manufacturer recommends starting with 1 pound of red wigglers (about 1,000 worms, which costs about $56 from a worm farm). The small, compact container can hold about 2 gallons of compost and soil, and it easily fits on a countertop or shelf. The maximum amount of food waste per batch is 1 cup, no more than three to four times a week (depending on the rate your worms break down food). This might be enough for one person or a couple who doesn’t cook much, but it can’t handle much more than that, especially for a family that cooks often.
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Food mix: Worm feed needs to be around 50 percent food scraps and 50 percent fiber, such as leaves, coffee filters, and paper. The worms gobble up most fruits and vegetables, except citrus, onions, garlic, and other alliums, and also dine on plain bread, pasta, and rice. Meat and bones, dairy products, seasoned foods, and oil are no-no’s.
Convenience: This kit comes with more accessories than most, which could be encouraging for vermicompost beginners. A soil meter helps new users maintain the proper moisture, light, and pH levels for worms to thrive. (Once you get the hang of it, you should be able to assess the condition of your bin just by looking at it.) The hole where you add food waste is tight and forces it to be concentrated in one area. The worms break down the waste more efficiently when food is spread out throughout the lower level, but this requires taking off the entire cork lid. The lid can also shrink, expand, or warp when the room temperature and humidity fluctuate, leaving gaps along the edges for worms to escape or bugs to enter, or making the lid difficult to remove.
Ick factor: There’s no spigot to remove excess liquid, although Chen says proper compost shouldn’t leach much liquid (a sign that you’re overfeeding the worms). If you accidentally overfeed them, the bin contents could get too wet, and there’s no way to drain out the excess liquid. The bin was mostly odorless, but fruit flies were a problem at times. The instructions don’t indicate any need for covering up the food scraps with bedding (moist newspaper), but not doing so resulted in fruit flies.
Compost quality: Anytime you’re using worms you’re going to get high-quality compost with the highest amount of beneficial microorganisms in it, according to Chen. Because the composter is small, you can pull out handfuls at a time from the loft inside the bin and add it to the topsoil of your houseplants once a month or so.
Digging in the Dirt: 4 Home Composters Reviewed
I’m a big fan of composting, but it doesn’t always go according to plan. Recently, a rat moved into my compost pile. It seemed to have a particular fondness for coffee grounds. After several frank exchanges of views, I persuaded Colin the Compost Rat (as I christened him) to move on. That’s one of the occupational hazards of composting: A pile of rotting stuff is considered a delicacy by many creatures, and however well you protect and fence your mixture of kitchen scraps and garden trimmings, they will find a way in. While I celebrate all the fauna of the earth, I don’t necessarily want them living outside my bedroom window, especially when one of them is getting a caffeine buzz.
So, what’s the alternative to an outdoor, open-air compost pile? Home composting devices are one option, simple machines that are meant to be used indoors, right there in the kitchen. A variety of devices exist to take your compostable waste and cook it down into a nutrient-rich, soil-like mix that you can dig into your flower bed. I tested some of these devices: the $300 Vitamix FoodCycler FC-50, the $499 Pela Lomi, the $429 BeyondGreen Kitchen Waste Composter, and the $429 Reencle Prime.
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So, can these home composters—all of which use heat and agitation to break down waste—turn a pile of food scraps and coffee pods into something useful? My top pick, the Reencle, produced a light, well-broken-down mix from pretty much anything I threw in it. All of the products struggled with tougher food waste, like banana skins and the coffee pods, often taking much longer to break these down.
In some cases, it might be better to leave your composting to the experts. As Joe Ray noted in his original review of the FoodCycler FC-50, if you have a municipal composting service, you can just throw the waste straight into the collection bins (and possibly get compost back from the agency for your trouble). If you don’t have access to a local composting service, making your own compost heap isn’t that hard, as long as you aren’t visited by Colin the Compost Rat. You could also pick up a barrel designed to process compost outdoors. But if you don’t have space or the desire for outdoor composting, these devices can produce compost from your everyday food waste and compostable stuff right there on your kitchen counter.
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