You know, I never thought much about what happened to our garbage after the truck picked it up every Tuesday. Been throwing stuff away for forty-three years without giving it a second thought. Then last spring I was working on an electrical job at this house in Mount Airy, and the homeowner had this whole setup in her backyard – bins, piles of leaves, what looked like organized chaos. Turns out she was composting, and when I asked about it (mostly out of curiosity), she started explaining how much money she saved on fertilizer and how much less trash they put out each week.
That got me thinking. Our trash bill keeps going up, and my wife’s always complaining about how much we spend on potting soil and fertilizer for her little garden. Plus, I’d been reading about how landfills produce methane, which is apparently way worse for the environment than regular carbon dioxide – like twenty-eight times worse, according to what I found online. Made me realize we were literally paying money to create a bigger environmental problem.
So I started paying attention to what we were throwing away. Food scraps, coffee grounds, yard waste – probably half our trash was stuff that could decompose naturally if you let it. Seemed pretty stupid to bag it up and send it to a landfill when I could just let it rot in my own backyard and use it to improve our soil. I mean, that’s basically what composting is, right? Controlled rotting.
My wife thought I was losing it when I announced I wanted to start composting. She’d seen me try various projects over the years – like the time I decided to build a deck without really knowing how to build a deck – and most of them didn’t turn out exactly as planned. But this seemed simpler somehow. Throw organic stuff in a pile, let microbes do their thing, eventually get dirt. How hard could it be?
Turns out there’s actually some science to it, which I probably should’ve researched before just dumping kitchen scraps in the corner of our yard. You need the right mix of what composting people call “greens” and “browns.” Greens are nitrogen-rich stuff like vegetable peels, grass clippings, coffee grounds. Browns are carbon-heavy materials like dry leaves, paper, cardboard. The ratio matters, and so does moisture and air circulation. Basically, you’re creating the perfect environment for bacteria and fungi to break everything down.
I started simple with just a designated corner of the yard where I’d pile up kitchen scraps and fall leaves. Added some water when it looked dry, turned it over with a shovel every couple weeks to get air into it. The whole process was slower than I expected – took about six months before I had anything that looked like actual compost. But when it finally worked, man, it was like magic. All that garbage had turned into this rich, dark soil that smelled like earth after it rains.
Problem was, I made every beginner mistake you can imagine. The pile got too wet and started smelling like something died in it. Had to add more dry leaves and turn it more often to fix that. Then I discovered we had rats checking out the food scraps, which my wife was not happy about. Learned you can’t just throw any food waste in there – meat, dairy, oils attract pests. Stick to fruit and vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, eggshells, that kind of thing.
After dealing with the rat situation (enclosed the whole thing with wire mesh), I got curious about other methods. Read about vermicomposting, which is basically letting worms eat your garbage and produce really high-quality compost. Bought a worm bin setup and a pound of red worms online. Felt pretty weird ordering worms through the mail, but they arrived healthy and immediately got to work eating our kitchen scraps.
The worm composting was actually easier than regular composting in some ways. Faster too – those little guys can process food scraps in just a few weeks. But you have to be more careful about what you feed them. Citrus peels and onions make them unhappy, and too much of anything acidic can kill them off. I learned this the hard way after dumping a bunch of orange peels in there and finding a bunch of dead worms the next week.
Then I heard about bokashi composting from a customer who was from Japan originally. It’s this fermentation process where you use special microbes to break down food waste in an airtight container. You can even compost meat and dairy with this method, though you still have to bury the fermented waste afterward or add it to regular compost. Bought the special bokashi bran you need for the microbes, and it worked pretty well, though buying that bran every few months gets expensive.
Honestly, regular outdoor composting ended up being the most practical for us. Once I figured out the right balance and stopped making rookie mistakes, it pretty much ran itself. Every few weeks I’d turn the pile, add new scraps on one side while the other side finished decomposing. We went from putting out two full trash bags every week to maybe one bag every other week. That’s real money saved on trash pickup.
But the best part was using the finished compost in our yard. I’d been buying bags of topsoil and fertilizer every spring, spending probably fifty or sixty bucks to improve the soil around our house. Now I had an endless supply of high-quality soil amendment that cost nothing except time. Mixed it into the existing soil before planting, used it as mulch around shrubs, top-dressed the small patch of grass in our backyard.
The difference was obvious immediately. Plants that used to struggle started thriving. Our tiny vegetable garden produced more tomatoes and peppers than we could eat. Even the grass looked better, and I didn’t have to water as much because the improved soil held moisture longer. My wife became a convert when she saw how much better her flowers were doing.
Started talking to neighbors about it, especially the older folks who remembered when people composted regularly because you didn’t waste anything during the Depression. Turns out several people on our block had tried composting at some point but gave up when they ran into problems. Helped a couple of them troubleshoot their setups – usually just issues with the green-to-brown ratio or not turning the pile enough.
The whole experience changed how I think about waste in general. Once you start composting, you become aware of how much organic material we throw away that could be turned into something useful. At work sites, I see contractors throwing away perfectly good wood scraps, metal offcuts, materials that could be recycled or reused. Same wasteful mentality, just on a bigger scale.
Got my boys involved too, though they think it’s weird that their dad is suddenly obsessed with rotting vegetables. They take turns emptying the kitchen compost container into the outdoor pile, and I’ve taught them how to turn it properly and what can go in versus what can’t. Figure it’s a useful skill for them to have, especially if they end up owning houses someday.
The environmental benefits are nice, but honestly the practical advantages are what keep me doing it. Less trash pickup cost, free fertilizer, better soil, healthier plants. It’s just good economics, and the fact that it also reduces landfill waste and methane emissions is a bonus. Same reason I switched to LED bulbs and improved our insulation – makes financial sense first, helps the environment second.
Now I’ve got three active compost areas going – one for fresh scraps, one that’s actively decomposing, and one that’s finished and ready to use. Neighbors have started asking for finished compost since I produce more than we can use. Thinking about suggesting a neighborhood composting program where we all contribute materials and share the finished product, though organizing anything with neighbors can be like herding cats.
What started as curiosity about one customer’s backyard setup has turned into a whole system that saves us money, improves our yard, and reduces our waste stream. Not bad for what amounts to managing controlled decomposition in my backyard. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most effective ones.
