hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3157.txt

Episode: 3157
Title: HPR3157: Compost
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3157/hpr3157.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 17:58:40

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3157 for Tuesday 8 September 2020. Today's show is entitled,
Compost and is part of the series' cooking. It is hosted by Clartu
and is about 43 minutes long and carries a clean flag. The summary is,
How and Why to Compost.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
You are listening to Hacker Public Radio. This is Clartu and this episode is going to be about composting.
Composting is a sort of a strangely mundane dark art that I long ago thought was mysterious and something that only very serious gardeners do.
And I thought it took a lot of time and a lot of effort. And it just seemed almost like a fringe thing.
You do only under certain circumstances and only if you're a certain type of person. It just didn't seem like a normal thing to do.
This was back in the U.S. when I was living in the U.S. and I just didn't know anyone personally who composted.
And I watched a YouTube video about it or something at one point. I don't remember even how I stumbled upon that.
But when I saw it, there was the person presenting it was really, really into composting and he made it seem quite complex actually.
And he had some kind of fancy compost bin that you put your food scraps into.
I'll get to what actually composting is in a moment if you don't know.
But you put stuff into it and you turn it and rotate it every now and again.
And I'm sure it was a very, I'm sure his setup was very, very good.
But it was not the right description for who I was at that point or where I was in my life at that point.
It just didn't make any sense to me and I thought, okay, so composting very advanced topic, nowhere near ever needing to know about compost.
Then I moved to New Zealand and everyone here in New Zealand, well, I shouldn't say everyone.
It is more common than not for people here in New Zealand to maintain some notion of a compost station of some of a means by which they can compost.
And so I started getting into it because it was the natural thing to do.
Boy, did I, little did I know how natural it actually was.
So what is composting?
Well, composting is decay.
First of all, let's be clear here, I'm not a scientist.
But there's this natural process that causes organic matter to break down into simpler components,
into the components that they're made of, really like carbon dioxide and water.
And I'm sure probably various sugars and minerals and things like that.
This is part of the nutrient cycle. This is how the earth replenishes the natural food sources for other living beings on other forms of life on this planet.
So for instance, you could eat an apple and you take the apple core and you just throw it outside, right? Throw it on the ground.
Well, given enough time, that apple core starts to break down into component parts.
And given enough time, it eventually becomes, well, it does.
It becomes what we call soil, like it becomes dirt.
It becomes, it goes back into the earth, right?
And that process, of course, makes it possible and replenishes the soil, the earth.
And that makes it a particularly healthy environment for a new plant to grow.
Now, if you're lucky, that plant that happens to grow in that area is something that will bear fruit, edible fruit.
And then you can walk along and eat that plant or eat the fruit of the plant.
And then you're alive now. Your life is renewed. You are nourished, it's what I'm trying to say.
Now, obviously throwing an apple core does not necessarily lead to an edible plant, like that's not how that works.
And the likelihood of that happening is relatively slim.
But my point is that when you take some food scraps and you let it decompose naturally,
then it becomes nutrient-rich soil that you can then use, for instance, in a garden or you can sprinkle across the ground.
And it will not be a fertilizer, but it is nutrient-rich and it is important for that to happen.
I'm not saying that the earth is in any danger of running out of soil, but the process of composting, of letting things decay and become the components that then help other things grow,
which, in turn, feeds something higher on the food chain and so on, that's the cycle, that's the natural cycle of really organic life on this planet.
It's kind of significant. And you'll see this in action, like if you've never done that before, if you've never really thought about where do things go when I throw them away,
you'll see it in action if you go out just for a walk in the park, in a city park or the woods if you're not in a city.
You'll see compost happening all around you, mostly under your feet. You might see a pile of fallen leaves after the autumn.
And if you kind of rummage around in there, you'll get to the bottom of it all. And that bottom layer is often kind of soily and not grimy, but it's starting to decay.
And we smell that a lot too. Like when you walk outside, for instance, in the autumn or midway through the autumn,
and you smell that sort of that rich smell or if you just go again out in the park or in the woods rather, you can breathe in and you can kind of smell that rich, kind of earthy smell.
And part of that is that process of things settling and slowly decaying, being eaten up by worms and so on.
And it all kind of decomposes eventually and becomes just part of the earth again.
It's really quite magical and it's something that a lot of us I don't think really think about often.
But I think the reason that we don't think about it often is because we've become quite divorced from that process.
And in fact, if you think about the sort of the least certainly growing up in suburban America myself, the assumption and the default setting was that you eat something,
you eat some food and the scraps that you have left over, whether it's like an apple core or a banana peel, egg shells after you cook an egg, whatever those little bits of food that you normally have left on the plate or after you're cooking and sort of shoved off onto the side of the kitchen counter, those food scraps just go into the bin, right?
Into the rubbish bin, into the trash can, the proverbial one that you keep under the sink or off to the side with a lid on it, that's where you put all that stuff.
And then at the end of the week you gather up the plastic bag containing all the trash in your house and you tie it up and you take it to the curb of the house and someone dump truck or a garbage man or whatever you call them.
You call them comes by and picks up the bag and takes it away and just vanishes is just gone.
And what's really happening of course is that it's taken to a landfill, we all know this somewhere in the back of our mind, we know this, it's taken to a landfill, it's just put into a big pile and it's left there to sort of ideally hopefully maybe decay over the course of many, many, many, many, many years.
We all know that's not the best model and when you think about the natural process of what, what could happen of this weird, cool, amazing, closed loop system that has clearly worked for a very, very long time and continues to work if you let it work.
If you think about that versus what we're doing with, especially food scraps I think, just putting them into a plastic bag and then putting that into the ground, it seems kind of silly, right?
Because obviously the food scraps, we could just put them into the ground, right? We don't need to put them into a plastic bag first and then put the plastic bag into the ground, that's silly.
And in fact it impedes the process of composting.
When you have food scraps and you put them into a plastic bag and put that into a landfill, you're not creating, you're not providing the ideal environment for those food scraps to properly and naturally.
It doesn't have all the right oxygen and as it decomposes it's giving off different gases and that's being trapped within the plastic bag.
So you don't get like really the correct decaying process. That's not what's happening inside of that plastic bag you've tied up and thrown into a landfill.
I mean it does eventually decompose but it's not in the way that it wants to.
I guess again not a scientist at all but I guess it's possibly sort of like the process of fermentation.
There's a certain process happening that you're encouraging when you ferment something and that's a completely different process than what would happen if you just poured something onto the ground.
One produces some kind of fermented delightful treat hopefully and the other just pours the thing onto the ground and it gets absorbed by the, you know, it gets absorbed and sort of just does something else.
It doesn't ferment.
So it's sort of similar to that. You put food scraps in compost and the decay is naturally and becomes nutrient-rich soil.
You put food in a plastic bag, tie up the plastic bag and bury the plastic bag along with a bunch of other plastic bags doesn't happen quite the same way.
So composting is super simple as what I'm trying to say. It's a natural process. It's easy to do and it makes more sense.
We know that there's a closed loop system. We know that this process of renewal and recycling is possible and is actually the natural default.
So rather than fighting against it and concealing food scraps in plastic and taking it to a landfill, what I'm saying is that it makes more sense to simply compost the food scraps.
I'm going to talk a little bit about what or how to do that exactly and then I'll talk about what you might do with the nutrient-rich soil that you end up with and also probably talk about some common, maybe misconceptions.
So first of all, to compost, it's really, really easy. You get a bin. It can be a plastic rubbish bin, a bucket, so you need to know your space.
So you could get a big plastic rubbish bin like the one that you take out to the curb, 50 gallon rubbish bin, whatever. You could get one of those.
If you have a curb, if you're living in an apartment and you don't take your own trash out, then maybe that's not a realistic thing for you to do.
You don't have room for a big rubbish bin to dedicate to composting. Well, you can just use a bucket. You can use a small bucket.
Now, you'll need a lid to fight odor, but it can be quite a small bucket. I've done that. I've had it under a sink before. It works.
You can also, if you're out in the sort of a rural setting, you can make your own bin from wood. You can just kind of make a little compost house.
Little tiny sort of, again, just a bin. I've actually made one out of pallets. Just the discarded pallets after a grocery store gets a big shipment.
They'll sometimes put the pallets out back for people to take away. They label it. They make it clear that you're allowed to take it.
You can take those pallets and use the wood to make a box, a big box, which then becomes your compost bin.
The point is that you need a location into which you will put your food scraps.
I'll describe two different setups, one for the exterior, one if you have a backyard, essentially, and one if you do not.
If you've got a backyard, you can take any kind of bin and just place it not too close to your house.
A little bit of distance is generally considered to be good, and that's just sort of part convenience and part just kind of keeping it not encouraging, like, vermin or anything like that, which we'll talk about in a moment or a little bit later as well.
Put it somewhere that makes sense for your appearances and just make sense.
Put that in your backyard, this bin.
What I see in New Zealand a lot are dedicated compost bins that are actually sold by stores as compost bins.
What they are is their plastic boxes with a lid on top, but a hollow bottom. There's no bottom to these bins.
I feel like that's the preferred method because you kind of want that the compost, you want it to have contact with the earth.
It just makes more sense to let it have contact with the earth. It's not strictly necessary. I've done it without that, but I think it does make more sense to enable that to let it have contact with the earth.
Not for any mystical reason or anything, it's just because that way moisture and stuff can drain down and so on, and worms can get up and so on.
You want that, you want like earthworms that they're great for compost. Not so much like maggots and things like that, that you want to avoid, and we'll talk about that later.
But yeah, a little bin, no bottom, but a top. It doesn't need to be completely weatherproof.
It needs to be mostly weatherproof. You don't want rain constantly barrage your compost, but if there's a little bit of moisture that gets in, a little bit of wind, and so on, that's actually a good thing.
You kind of want to air it out a little bit, so it doesn't have to be airtight by any means, but it should be some kind of bin that can contain your food scraps.
Now, if you're doing this inside, you can do this with two buckets. You get sort of the big square buckets that they sell at like a hardware store, like lows or home depot or miter tin or bunnings or wherever you live, whatever your local hardware store is, and you need two of them and you stack them.
Now, that leaves a little bit of a gap between the bottom one and the top one, and drill some holes in the top one, in the bottom of the top one.
So now you've got two buckets sitting in each other, and some holes to allow drainage, some moisture to drip down into that bottom bucket.
That's just, that's kind of a nice thing to have. Again, not strictly necessary, but I'll talk about some of the alternatives later.
I'll lid on the top bucket, because if it's going to be indoors, as it decays, it will start to smell, so you want a good tight lid on that to keep the odor way way down.
If at all possible, I would keep that bucket outside, just that way you don't have to worry about the odor whenever you lift it up to put more food into it.
It's not a, it's not the worst odor in the world. It's just not the most pleasant odor in the world.
So if you have, like, a window and a fire escape, just put that bucket out there, put it out of the way of, like, the actual, like, the ladders of the fire escape don't block, obviously.
That would be probably illegal, but also very dangerous. Don't block anyone's path down the fire escape.
But if you have, like, a balcony or whatever, you can just stick the bucket out there.
Or if you live on the ground floor, then you can just pop it right outside your back door, whatever, you know, sort of work around you have.
And what I also have done and still do, actually, just for convenience, is I'll keep a small jar.
Well, actually a large jar, pickle jar, actually, in my kitchen.
And then as I collect food scraps over the course of one day, I just put it in the jar.
And then at the end of the day, or every other day, or every three days, whatever it takes for that jar to get full, I take that out to the compost bin and dump it in there.
Or if I have a compost bin under my sink, if it's, if I'm in an apartment, I'm no longer in an apartment.
So ever, I'm speaking of that in the past because apartments are in my past.
You take the jar and put it into the bucket just at the end of the night or whenever the jar is full.
And that just kind of, that just means that you don't have to keep going back to that compost bin all the time.
It's just slightly more convenient.
Okay, so now you've got a bin and the bin is full.
You're filling the bin with food scraps.
You want to, you want to put pretty much anything, any food scraps that you have you can put into this bin other than dairy products.
I mean, a little bit of dairy, honestly, I don't really, I'm not, I'm not really super careful about that.
I mean, a little bit of dairy gets in there. It's not that big of a deal.
But also know your region, like if you know that you're, that, that, that if you believe that if you put dairy outside,
then vermin would be all over it or, or bugs would be all over it instantly.
Yeah, maybe don't put that in your, in your compost.
And certainly no meat, you're not putting meat into your compost.
Even bones really, I like to avoid even bones.
I don't actually eat meat, but if I were going to or if I'm around someone eating meat,
I would not put that meat into the compost bin or even the bones of that meat.
It's just not something that I think is a good idea.
However, if you clean the bone off, it, it actually you kind of can.
Again, know your own region, maybe experiment around a little bit if you're not really too sure.
But the, the bone, you could put some bone in there.
It's not going to, it's not the end of the world.
It just won't really decompose in a, in any time quickly, but you can bury it or something later.
And, and certainly rose bushes apparently really, really like bone.
But I think just of us like grind it up or something, blood and bone, I think is what it's called.
So yeah, people, people actually fertilize their roses with blood and bone apparently.
Never done that.
But yeah, so no meat, no dairy, no feces, not cat, not dog and not human, don't do that.
Apparently like horse and cow manure and there's probably sheep manure.
Apparently that'll, or sheep droppings, whatever you call that.
Apparently that, I, I guess that's okay.
I don't have any experience with large farm animals.
So I don't, I can't say one way or the other, how that would affect the compost.
And I'm sure someone out there into hacker public radio land does know very well.
What I've heard though from the locals is that it's probably better to just let that sort of be its own pile and, and have your food scraps be its own pile.
And you use them essentially, you know, for, for sort of different purposes.
That's what I've heard.
Again, no experience with that, in, in that regard at all.
But definitely keep the food scrap compost pretty much just food scraps.
That, when you, and that does example, that does include, for example, leftover coffee, like the coffee ground, ground coffee.
After you've made a couple coffee, you can, you can throw coffee in there to compost loves coffee.
In fact, there's a cafe locally here in town where I live that sets out the coffee from its espresso machine.
And people just, you're allowed to just walk by and grab a couple of spoonfuls of used coffee.
And I didn't know why anyone would do that at first.
And then someone explained to me that the compost loves ground coffee.
So yeah, I do that all the time now.
And it's great because it does. It helps, it helps break everything down.
But I don't know that. I just said that. I have no idea what it does.
You just add it to the compost. And later you have really nice compost.
That's all I know. I don't know what chemical process is actually happening.
Okay. So anyway, you've got the bin. You're adding your food scraps.
And you just keep adding food scraps. That's all there is to it.
This is a natural process. It's not that complex.
You put food scraps into a bucket and you wait three months, three, six months, whatever.
The stuff on the bottom starts to compost first. It starts to decay and get broken down.
And it kind of, it apparently sort of encourages the upper layers as you keep adding food onto it to also decompose.
So it's kind of like this, you know, you got a little ecosystem going there, ecosystem of decay.
But what that means is that you are always adding fresh food scraps to the top of your compost bin.
So you, if you want to actually find the part that's been decomposed properly and has become soil,
that's all at the bottom. So how do you get down there to the bottom?
And that's the, that's probably the most complex part about this whole process is like figuring out what your strategy is to get to your nutrient rich soil that you've created over the course of three or five or six or nine months.
A couple of different ways to do this. You can either, for instance, if you've got a, if you've put your compost into a bin without a bottom, then just lift the bin a little bit and soil falls out.
Your soil at the bottom and it'll just kind of fall out. It tumbles out gravity, stuff like that. So that's what I do because I have a bin without a bottom on it.
And I just lift it up a little bit, scoop out the soil, or tip it back a little bit, scoop out the soil, distribute it in my garden.
And then I put the, you know, secure the bin again and just rinse and repeat pretty much.
But like I said, you'll always have that top layer of kind of like fresh compost because you're eating food every day and you keep adding more compost.
Now some people I've been told have two compost bins for this very reason. They'll fill one up with compost or rather with food scraps.
And when it reaches, I don't know, you know, a good level, they will then kind of retire that one for three months.
And then they'll use the other one for three months while the other one kind of does its thing.
I don't know how well that works. I've never, I've never done that.
Actually, you know what, that's not true. I've done that sort of in a almost a way that I never thought about it.
One compost bin I had mostly lawn clippings in it with some food and stuff.
And then I had another compost bin that I used for my food scraps.
It was a fancy compost bin that I got sort of as part of the rental property that I was living on at the time.
And it was technically a worm farm is what it was called.
And it was a compost bin specially designed with like different levels. So it had trays on it.
And you would put your food scraps in there and you had this colony of earthworms in there that would help decompose all the food.
It was amazing. And they would crawl up the levels of the bin as you put more food scraps in there.
And then when one was full, you'd move that to the bottom of the system.
And it was just, it was this crazy cycle that was very much just centered around worms.
It was very, very fascinating. I was way out of my depth. I had no idea what I was doing.
I do want to do that again at some point, but it was pretty, pretty, pretty complex.
But anyway, don't let that frighten you off.
The easy way to compost is to put food scraps in a bin and then let it sit for three months.
That's it. That's really all you need to do.
Now, some people, depending on your ventilation and such, some people will say you should kind of rotate it.
You should air it out, whatever.
I don't know much about that because really most of my experience has been just putting a bin outside and putting food into it.
That's been my main experience with composting.
And I think if I could, if I had the choice, that would be that would be what I would do.
That would be the method that I would use.
In a less kind of open outdoorsy environment, you do sometimes have to be a little bit more attentive of your compost.
And make sure that the moisture is draining out properly or moisture is draining out.
And you want to kind of make sure that the composting action, the decomposition is actually happening and that it's not suffocating.
Basically. And that can be a little bit difficult.
And the first time I did that in an apartment, it didn't work out all that well.
There are some, there's a mineral mixture that you can buy at hardware stores to encourage composting in a bucket.
It's kind of useful, but you have to kind of look around for it.
And I don't know if it's, I don't know, it's availability in the state.
Because that was before I composted.
I never looked for this stuff in the states.
So there are ways to make it happen in an apartment.
It's just that you do have to be a little bit more attentive to it.
And kind of kind of keep an eye on it, basically, which seems weird, because you don't know what you're looking for.
Like keeping an eye on it just doesn't make any sense, right?
And the thing is that your compost should be always moving toward the state of being soil.
Which, again, doesn't really make sense if you've never seen this happen.
But if you can imagine the two different ways that things can decompose,
one is that, like I say, it dissolves into soil essentially.
It breaks down into components and it becomes literal soil, like earth.
Like the actual earth becomes that. That's crazy as that sounds. That's actually what happens.
The other way is the sort of less ideal way where we've all seen it.
Where, you know, the trash just kind of, it becomes, it becomes a slimy and grimy and gloopy and just kind of a sludge.
That's not really what you want. That's not a healthy compost.
And there are some things if that's happening to your compost in action.
If you've filled a bucket up with food scraps and you've had to put a lid on it because you want to keep the odor in.
First of all, make sure that you're getting some drainage.
Like I described, two bucket system, drill some holes in the top bucket so that any excess moisture drips down into the bottom bucket.
And you can empty that out on a regular, semi-regular basis.
You want to do that. You also could add a little bit of, let's call it roughage, which that's not really what it is, I guess.
But grass clippings, like lawn clippings, just dry leaves, things like that.
Sort of crunchy, fibrous stuff to kind of give your compost a little bit more body.
It tends to help. I don't know why it just does.
It tends to buff up your compost and encourage it to move away from just becoming sludge and sort of to becoming like something a little bit more like, I don't know, plant like something with substance to it.
And like I say, if you can get that bucket, if you're in an apartment and you're doing composting in a bucket, if you can set that outside and give it a little bit of air so that the lid is on it, but it doesn't have to be air tight.
That really is preferable because that way you just, you know, it's got some ventilation and it can breathe and so on.
And oxygen obviously is really great for that process. Oxidization, I guess, or oxidizing, whatever.
So yeah, that's composting and it's really easy and it is a natural process.
That's the main thing to remember is that this is actually a natural process.
And when you let it happen, you're cutting way down on the amount of trash that you're taking out to the curb. It's kind of astonishing.
Me and my partner are just two people. We eat a normal amount of food for two people, I guess.
And since I started composting, I don't take the rubbish bin to the curb sometimes for a whole month. It just doesn't.
There's other things that I'm doing to impact that as well, which I'll go over maybe in a different episode.
But it is amazing how little I take trash to the curb now because the food, you know, especially if you've got a kitchen, right?
If you've got foods under your sink or wherever you keep your trash can, you got food there, slowly decaying.
I mean, the urge to get that out of your living space is rather pressing.
So if you don't have that in your living space to begin with, the urgency to get, you know, trash, which without the food scraps, it's just dry trash, right?
So the urgency just goes way, way down. It just isn't as important anymore.
So getting that food scrap stuff into some place that it can be contained and it can safely compost, it's a huge, huge thing.
It'll change the way that you view sort of your entire life, to be honest. It just completely changes the process of what you do with rubbish and how big of a problem rubbish is for you.
You can also put some paper into compost a lot of times.
Other things will be labeled as home compostable. Some things that say they're recyclable, recycling doesn't mean composting.
It can be, but it doesn't necessarily mean composting.
So if you see something that says it is home compostable and you can put it in your compost, and there's all kinds of stuff that has surprised me.
You have to look for it, but I mean, I've gotten paper bags and even paper-based trays from cafes, sometimes even potato starch, silverware, or not silverware, but plasticware, but it's actually potato starch or something.
Yeah, all kinds of weird things end up being home compostable if you do enough investigation on the subject. Put that in your compost, it's fine.
Some of that stuff doesn't compost quite as quickly as other things. Egg shells, for instance, don't compost at all. I don't really eat a whole lot of egg myself.
My partner does, and so we have some egg shells in there. They don't really ever seem to break down, but what does happen is they become quite brittle, and you can kind of just crush them up once you take the soil out of your compost.
You can just crush it up, and it becomes just kind of like calcium or whatever. I don't really know what egg shell is, I forget.
But yeah, it just kind of becomes part of like little mineral specks in the soil, and it's fine. It's fine, it's healthy.
So that's composting. Let's talk about some of the things that you could do with this soil.
First of all, it is soil. It is like the soil, you know, if you go to the hardware store at Gardening Center, whatever, and you've seen maybe these big, big heavy bags of soil for like $11 or whatever they sell them for.
I used to always wonder like, why would someone buy a bag of dirt? Like that just seemed so odd. And then I kind of learned that all dirt isn't created equal.
Exactly. Some dirt is very clay-like. Some dirt is very nutrient-rich. Some dirt has had vegetables growing in it, and so all those nutrients have been sort of sucked out of the soil.
So you're supposed to rotate your crops or whatever. So people buy this nutrient-rich soil because they know that they want to plant something that needs nutrients.
Well, when you're composting, that's what you are creating. So you could, I don't know, go into business and sell nutrient-rich soil. Like literally you actually could, I don't know how much money you'd make compared to the local garden center, but whatever.
I'm just saying, that's the same thing. You're essentially producing soil just like you would buy in a garden center.
So you can use this soil that you've created from food scraps to, you know, in pots. If for house plants, you could use it in a garden. If you want to start growing, I don't know, anything from your own herbs in the windowsill to tomato plants, to lettuce and potatoes and onions and radishes and artichokes, whatever else you might plant and then eat.
Obviously, for a nice big garden, you'd need a backyard or a front yard or whatever, a garden. But there's stuff that you can do in an apartment as well. You can plant herbs and things like that. We've all seen that all over the place.
People have all kinds of things in their window cells and it's really quite pleasant. You can also just do anything that you would normally do with dirt.
If you're just doing this to keep stuff out of the landfill and you have nothing to do with your soil, you can just take it outside and sprinkle it on the ground. It is dirt. It is the earth. It is a natural substance. You can just toss it anywhere.
It will go back into the ecosystem. It's fine.
Let's talk about some of the misconceptions of composting. First one is something I've kind of mentioned already a little bit, but that is the smell.
When you tell people, hey, you could just take food scraps and throw it outside and wait for it to decay. I think the uncharitable image that you get in your mind is sort of this medieval sludge pile of garbage that's festering and stinky.
You'd be surprised at how that is not an accurate image. If you're doing this right and it doesn't take as much effort as it might seem to do it right, it really is. It's just this weird sort of perfect natural process that just happens.
As long as you give it a little bit of environmental protection, a bin to put it into so that it's not just falling all over the place. You kind of want to create a little bit of a, I don't know if it's technically a greenhouse, but you're creating an environment where in the woods out in the woods where you're walking and you've got those dry leaves and under all the dry leaves, this stuff is composting.
It's kind of, it's all sort of happening under the surface. And that's what you're kind of creating when you make this compost bin. You're giving it this sort of space for it to safely decompose.
It doesn't smell, if it smells, I mean, it might smell a little bit. You probably wouldn't want to just hang out in the bin, but as the composting happens, it's more of an outdoorsy smell and sort of a rank rancid garbage smell.
And if you're getting a rank rancid garbage smell, then you need to add some more stuff into it, like something from the earth, like grass clippings, dead leaves, I don't know, something like that, something dry, you know, to give it sort of some body.
Does it attract rodents or other vermin? I've never had an issue with this, but I've heard that it can happen. And again, that kind of depends on your region.
And if you know that you are plagued by rats and mice and things like that, then you probably want to make your compost bin a little bit more, a little bit more secure than in an area that you know that not to be a problem.
And raccoons are a complete mystery to me. I've never lived really around raccoons as far as I can recall. Certainly not since composting, they don't exist on New Zealand, so in New Zealand.
So I no idea how to protect compost from a raccoon or whether they'd even be interested in it. I don't know. It feels like they would be, and they're supposed to be really smart and have very dexterous hands. So that's kind of up to you to explore.
Does composting take a lot of maintenance? Not really. After the initial setup, which I mean itself technically is pretty minimal, you just add scraps of food to your compost bin instead of tossing it into your rubbish bin in your kitchen.
It's just, it's really actually quite simple. Like I say, for added convenience, I keep my immediate food scraps in a jar in the kitchen that I close up.
And then I just take that jar out to the compost bin every other day or whatever and empty it out. It's pretty, pretty easy. So I don't even have to like sort of walk all the way to the backyard every day.
It's something that I don't even do all the time. So it's, it's really not a whole lot of maintenance.
Once every, I don't know, three months, maybe I'll scoop some soil out and add it to a garden plot or you can also stir it up a bit, you know, add it to a little bit, try to try to get it mixed up a bit.
If you feel like it, it's not really necessary. It kind of takes care of itself, generally speaking. Sometimes I'll add a little bit of garden clippings to it just for, just for good measure, just to kind of keep it a good mix.
I heard from somewhere, someone, I think the people who were helping me build the palette version of this, that you kind of wanted a mix of like deep, dark, rich colors and bright green colors, mostly dark, but a little bit green just to kind of help the process along, I guess.
So yeah, it's, it's not a whole lot of maintenance. You put the thing into a bin and you wait for it to decompose.
Keep an eye on it to make sure it's not becoming a sludge and that's really about it. So what if you don't need the soil? Well, you don't have to need soil to encourage and enable a natural process to happen.
It's one of those things where the benefit of composting, not only for your own living space, but also for your bigger living space, like the planet Earth, it just makes more sense to do it this way.
If you really think about the, almost the barbarism of taking food scraps that you cannot eat, like an apple core, well, actually you can eat an apple core, I've done it, but one doesn't want to.
The skin of a kiwi fruit, a banana peel, whatever, taking that stuff and putting it into a plastic bag and taking it off to the landfill.
It just doesn't make any sense. The fact that it has to sit at the bottom of your, you know, in your, in the trash can, in your living space until someone comes to take it by, that doesn't make any sense.
It's just, it's starting to rot, it's starting to smell. Why would we do that? I don't know. It's such a weird habit that we got into.
So just put it somewhere to let it decompose. It makes a lot more sense, to be honest, and then you do have soil at the end, but it's really actually quite easy to distribute soil.
That there's not really a shortage. Even if you live in a concrete jungle, you can find some place to distribute some soil.
It is not the worst thing in the world. It will wash away the next rainfall. It's, it's really not, it's not something that's going to be a burden.
Plus, you could always start an urban garden. Seriously, if you, if you live in a concrete jungle and you have no patches of earth upon which you can cast soil, then by all means do something about that.
Put, put out containers, fill those containers with soil, plant some seeds in them, and just see what happens. Like at worst you'll have some wildflowers that grow there, right?
And, and at best you'll have something that you can actually eat. So it's, it's definitely worth looking into.
And that's it. That's, that's composting. I strongly encourage composting. I have really, I've really appreciated accidentally falling into, into understanding how composting can happen in real life.
Like I say, I don't think I would have actually stumbled upon this on my own. It's really something. It's a cultural influence that I've definitely, definitely appreciated from New Zealand.
It is something that would be weird to go to an event in New Zealand and not see a place labeled compost. Like that's weird.
Whether it's just to a friend's house or to a big, a big group event, it's just, you just know that you're going to see different rubbish bins for recycling, for things that can't be recycled, and then for compost.
And, and you, you take the extra time to scrape your food scraps into the compost, to put the recyclable things into the recycle bin, and then on the off chance that you've got something that can't be recycled, you put it into the, the actual rubbish bin.
And, and it reduces so much, it, it's really, really surprising, and it feels strangely satisfying to sort of not block a natural process. It just makes more sense to enable that natural process to happen than to go out of your way to, to stop it from happening.
So give it a go, try composting. It's a lot of fun. It's really neat. It's chemistry and science and nature in action, and it's easy. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you next time.
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