Composting in the City

One of my New York, city-slicker-type friends asked me how all this granola-person compost stuff related to her.

Today’s topic: Compost for the City Slicker!

My opinion is that you definitely can compost in the city and have one real option: vermicompost.  Worms!

I definitely need some new worm pictures.

It is true that you can do “aerobic” compost (mix stuff together, it gets hot, presto) in your apartment, theoretically… but it’s hard enough to get right in the backyard.  If you get the mix of carbon and nitrogen wrong, i.e., the dry paper and leafy stuff to the wet kitchen wastey stuff, you will have that smell in your nose for days.   And flies.  And… juice.

Then there’s bokashi.  You buy some stuff… oops, don’t like that one.  Something weirdly cultish about it.

No, I think it’s worms for you city peeps.  A decent worm bin will handle a pretty good amount of kitchen waste, produce a lovely (non-stinky) juice that your plants will love, and, eventually, some nice compost to mix into your containers or, for that matter, to dump under a tree or share with a friend.  The point is, instead of sending more stuff to the landfill, you’re making productive use of it.

I wrote a far-too-long piece on the topic last year.

Getting your worms might be a little trickier, but I’ll bet you anything, if worse came to worst, that you could find a store in the Upper West Lower East Bridge Village that had some.

Right, so, in short:

Buy a couple plastic tubs, use one as the catchment for the tea that drips out, i.e., no holes.  I advise against putting this on a tray of some kind because you don’t want an open, spillable tray of worm tinkle just waiting for some buzz-killing accident.  If you want extra credit, buy a spigot for the bottom to make draining it easier.  Drill some holes in the top one  I tend to put lots of small (~1/4″) holes in the bottom and a few larger (~3/4″) holes around the top.

There, that is a brand new shot of air holes.

Some more things I didn’t mention: chop up your material.  To the degree possible, chop up bigger pieces.  The smaller the pieces are, the easier they are for the worms. The more stuff you want to move through there, the smaller you should chop it.

Also, in an indoor situation, you might put a layer of shredded paper (dry) inside the box over the top of the worms for further pestilence protection.  Outside, I don’t worry about flies and what-not.  Inside, you might not want that so muchish.

Let me know if you have questions.  Enjoy.

And for clarification:

These are not worms.