::composting::

as one of ryan's father's day gifts, he received a composter.

i know. i know. probably not the #1 gift on his list. but don't worry, it wasn't the only thing he received. and in all honesty, is has been something we have been talking about doing for well over a year, but have just never taken the plunge. well, we finally dove in.

and per request (yeah, blogging bud, erin!) i thought i'd tell you a bit about our progress thus far...

we decided on the garden gourmet. it is a recycled plastic composter that just has a simple lid on top and a sliding door on the bottom. it traps solar heat to speed composting and has air vents on the side to aid in the process. it snapped together very quickly with no tools.

our hope is to create nutrient rich soil for our garden while eliminating our waste.

i was suprised when i began to learn about composting how much we can compost that we typically throw away. almost all of our kitchen and yard scraps can be added to the composter. fruits, veggies, egg shells, coffee grounds, and plain breads can all be thrown in. the general premise is that you add equal green material (food products) and brown material (dried out lawn material) to the composter. you can even compost dryer lint, rags, paper towels and other paper products. the smaller the item you put into it, the quicker it will start to decompose.

each time i add waste from our kitchen, i toss in some yard waste and give it a quick stir. we have yet to have rich soil from it, but i can tell things are really working in there. stuff is quickly breaking down and i am excited to see what we produce!



my biggest concerns were the smell of the composter and also that we might attract vermin. so far, so good. when i purchased it, i was told that to prevent smells, you need to keep your ratio of green to brown material 1:1. so, i have been trying really hard to stick to that.

and so far, no animals have seemed to come knocking. it has a great door and lid that snap into place, so any animal would have to be pretty aggressive. but, we have had a big problem with our trash can, so that has been my biggest fear. but, so far, so good. i think that meat and dairy products are the big things that attract pests, so i have not put any of that into the composter. we do have some fruit flies around it, but that occasionally happens in our kitchen around our bananas...it was sure to happen around the composter! :)

the garden gourmet is not a batch composter. meaning you don't have to stop the composting process at any point and wait for compost to be created. some tumblers are batch composters. i didn't want to have to stop the process, so we steered clean of this kind.

anyway, so far, so good. i am excited to be composting and lily loves adding to our little kitchen bucket to take it down to the yard. if anyone has any advice or tips, i would love them!


here's to hoping our garden next year is even more bountiful due to the compost!

and just a little lily and finn love. we rode bikes to the park last week and due to a huge storm here, trees were down everywhere. someone had built a fort under a downed tree that they thought was awesome!