If you told me five years ago, that in the not too distant future I would be spied shoveling a 30 yard path through 70 inches of snow to my backyard compost bin, I would have told you to stage an intervention.  Aliens had clearly invaded my urban city girl body and someone needed to rescue me from their grips.  Organic lotion? But of course! Who wants to slather themselves in petrochemicals once they know better? Composting? Ewwww….

Yet, last week, here I was with my ready-to-burst silver two-gallon kitchen compost canister of already-rotting coffee grounds, grapefruit peels, teabags, left-over pasta, and celery tops facing thigh-high snow drifts to get to my backyard compost bin.  It sat wrapped in its warm winter jacket (so it can do its thing all year round) barely peeking over the snow.  Leaving the compost in the kitchen was not an option.  Throw it down the garbage disposal?  Not after everything I’ve been through to get to this point.  So I started shoveling…

For a long time, composting has been my “least favorite green action taken.”  I never liked the concept of storing food waste in my kitchen. I didn’t garden, so couldn’t appreciate the alleged “black gold” that my garbage would turn into. I have always had a weird aversion to anything that moves overland without legs or wings so why would I encourage worms to congregate anywhere near my house? When I lived in a city apartment, I could justify not composting with the “it’s impossible to compost in the city” excuse, although I was aware that new technologies, like the NatureMill, were rapidly making that excuse, well, lame.

A year into suburban living, the excuses were gone.  I had to at least give it a try because it was the most impactful thing we could do to reduce our weekly garbage pile (50 points on Practically Green!). Almost two-thirds of household trash is compostable. So I marched myself down to a wonderful green store in Cambridge and said “I’d like to start composting. But I’m a priss and hate worms so you can’t sell me anything that requires worms.”

Step One:  Select the Right System

To the store owner’s credit, he didn’t roll his eyes, shake his head or remind me that most composting involves worms — directly or indirectly.  He showed me a bokashi system, which is a black bin with a spout that looks like the church coffee server and a bag of sawdust-like stuff.  Evidently more than 3 million people in Korea use it and it’s quite popular in the highrises of Dubai. Who knew?

I got home and proudly displayed the set-up to my highly skeptical better half. He is the direction-reading one and the more he read, the more I began to realize that this system was way more intense than I was prepared for. Evidently it makes this tea, which is extremely good as a drain cleaner and fertilizer, but might make you vomit when you smell it. You have to buy and regularly sprinkle the sawdust stuff, which seemed expensive and, knowing us, ripe for arguments. I could envision the call, “Honey–on the way home could you get milk, yogurt and oh yes, we are out of bokashi.”  The bokashi system got returned the next weekend.

I started asking around the neighborhood for recommendations. Instead I got tales of raccoons the size of bears who would strew rotting food all over people’s lawns from their compost bins. I knew one morning of picking up corn cobs and tea bags from the swing set would really tick me off, so I went back to the green store. “I’d like to start composting, but I don’t want the tea, I don’t want any worms, and I need to protect the compost from raccoons the size of bears.”  This time, the owner suggested perhaps I peruse a book about composting before buying anything more. He directed me to this small very cute book called “Composting: An Easy Household Guide.” I was skeptical, especially when the first line read: “Once you start composting, you get hooked!”  How does one possibly get hooked on an onsite garbage dump??

However, the book was extremely helpful. Had I read it prior to the bokashi-buying-binge, we could have easily realized we are just not bokashi people. It also pointed out that worm farms are really for the composting enthusiast (so not us) or people with no outdoor space (not us either). The range of options for someone clueless like me with good outdoor space and only aggressive raccoons to deal with were Dalek bins, tumblers, digesters, and something called a “Green Johanna.” After reading each one-page description, the Green Johanna jumped out — and not just because they called it the “Rolls Royce” of composting systems. These were the words that sucked me in: “extremely user-friendly,” “you don’t need any composting experience,” “you can put anything in,” and “the sealed base plate keeps rats out.” Rats. I hadn’t even considered rats.

Step Two:  Set Up and Start Using Your System. Tweak as Needed.

Two weeks later, I set up a nice bamboo compost bin in the kitchen and the Green Johanna in the backyard and started collecting and dumping. I was very conscientious about adding in “browns” (newspapers, cardboard, grass clippings) to my “greens” (food waste).

Three weeks later, my kitchen was invaded by dozens of fruit flies that congregated around the compost canister. Nowhere in the book did it mention this disgusting turn of events or what to do if it happened. Some friends recommended Biobags and even gifted us a box. Another said that we just had to empty it everyday which we determined was not practical. Finally, my husband pointed out what should have been obvious had we paid attention to the flies more closely.  ”You know there is a hole in the canister and that’s how they are getting in and out, right?”  Ummmm…..no. We switched to a stainless steel canister and the indoor fly problem has vanished.  It also gave us the opportunity to double the size of the canister. Turns out this family creates a lot of kitchen waste.

Step Three:  Maintain the System. Accept certain level of “ick factor.”

We are now a full year into composting. I don’t care what composting enthusiasts say, there are still some aspects of composting that are rather gross. Coffee grounds stuck to the pail make my better half gag. Taking the stirring stick and shoving it up and down in the rotting matter is awesome for getting it to decompose faster, but you do feel like some hippy witch stirring her brew even in a wrap dress and two-inch heels. I’ve also had to perfect the open-the-top-and-hide-behind-it-move to avoid the torrent of flies that burst forth when you just didn’t get enough browns in to keep them at bay.

But as the book predicted and my shoveling proves, composting is addictive.  First, it’s amazing to me that it almost never fills up.  All that garbage just decomposes down into a fine dirt. Second, we have barely any garbage now. Between single-stream recycling and composting, we are down to less than one bag of garbage a week. Besides food waste, we’ve learned you can compost dryer lint, scrap paper, cereal boxes, and vacuum dust (if you don’t have synthetic carpet). We composted all the garbage from my son’s birthday party, our holiday wreaths (after removing the wire and ribbons), and recently changed coffee brands to one in a compostable bag.

Step Four:  Find a good use for that “humus”

Humus is the stuff that compost turns into when it’s matured. If you are a gardener, you  know and love this stuff because it can be an amazing addition to your soil.  When we started composting, we didn’t garden. Our first batch of humus got added to the trees, woods, and flowers along the fence. When we started a small garden, I was all excited to use the compost. However, one of those super-experienced neighborhood gardener types warned we should “test” the compost first. Test for what? Evidently, the right balance of pH and nutrients–not too few and not too many–and that it is “mature enough.” In everything else that needs doing, somehow “test the compost” just hasn’t hit the top of my prioritization list. My trees seem perfectly happy with the raw, untested, perhaps a little unruly and immature compost. So there.

When I get asked by skeptical friends who look me up and down and say “Seriously? You Compost?” I assure them that:

a. If I can compost, sometimes in 2-inch heels, anyone can compost. Sure it’s got a few icky parts, but if you have a dog or children, you are just used to some icky aspects of otherwise wonderful things.

b. I can’t actually imagine NOT composting now and it pains me to throw perfectly compostable stuff in the trash when I’m at other people’s homes or restaurants or work.

c.  I haven’t had to touch a worm. I know they are there, but they are blissfully quiet and relatively invisible, just doing their thing.  PHEW!