How to Compost: Expert Tips on Composting for Beginners

Even in normal times, food waste in the US is a big problem — before the coronavirus pandemic’s shelter-in-place rules went into place around the country, the average family was already wasting an average 25 percent of their food. In the last four months, we’ve seen residential food waste grow as many Americans are staying home and dining in to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Simultaneously — despite the need for more food waste solutions — many state and local composting programs have been suspended.

If you live in an area that no longer offers composting services, and you want to reduce your impact and cut back on personal food waste, home composting is a good way to start. To help newbies learn how to compost and cut back on some of the confusion surrounding the process — e.g. how do you keep rodents away? — we asked two compost and soil experts for their composting tips.

Why Compost?

In a sense, composting gives your food a second life, because the process keeps your food scraps and “waste” out of the landfill, and transforms it into a new resource, a nutrient-rich material that can be used for home gardening and farming. “Compost is full of billions of beneficial microorganisms, so you are feeding the soil. Compost enhances the fertility of the soil, it helps soil retain nutrients, and it helps hold water,” explains Brenda Platt, director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Composting for Community Project. “Compost really is just amazing.”

The easiest way to start composting is by collecting food scraps to bring to a compost drop-off location; many farmers’ markets and nonprofits collect compost and some cities have collection sites, as well as curbside compost pickup. But with safety restrictions in place and budgets tightened due to COVID-19, a number of these larger composting programs have been cut, including in cities like New York City, Lexington, Kentucky, and Alexandria, Virginia. While it’s an unfortunate loss for food waste advocates and the environment, it’s a call to action for residents to start composting at home. And the good news is that your end product might be even better than what the municipality would produce — and then sell — anyway.

“I actually suggest that people make their own compost rather than buying it from municipalities or large composting facilities,” says Jo Tobias, regenerative soils consultant and founder of Vancouver’s RootShoot Soils. “I find that when a system gets too large to manage, you run into more challenges, so I tend to let people know that their compost is going to be a lot better and will have a lot more diversity in microorganisms than what you would find in a large composting facility.” Challenges for municipal composting systems include needing to handle an array of items that are not compostable — such as produce stickers, twisty ties and plastic bags, as well as contaminants including municipal solid waste and pesticides in green materials.

Things to Leave Out

While composting is a great way to reduce your food waste and give your food scraps a second life, not everything goes in the compost pile. When people want to learn how to compost, one of the biggest fears is the possibility of smells, rodents and bugs that might appear. If you live in an urban area, an area with “rodent pressure,” as Platt likes to call it, it’s important to avoid adding meat, cooked food, moldy cheese and other items that could attract rodents. “Rodents like protein,” says Platt. “If you don’t put protein in there, you won’t attract rodents. And rotted meat can smell, so just avoid it.”

Another key thing to keep out of the pile are aggressive weeds, which likely carry seeds along with them. To effectively optimize a compost system — keeping the right balance of two parts carbon materials to one part nitrogen materials — will result in a hot environment. Platt says you need to maintain 145 degrees Fahrenheit for four days in order to prevent seeds from germinating. “If you’re picking all these weeds that you don’t really want in your garden and you put all the seeds in the compost, but you aren’t reaching 145 degrees, then you’d be reintroducing those seeds into your garden when you’re using that compost,” she explains. “Aggressive weeds, just leave out.”

At the end of the day, composting is all about trial and error. “Don’t give up,” says Platt. “It’s a very flexible, forgiving process. If it’s too wet, you add some dry leaves. If it’s too dry, you add water. If it seems like it’s a little smelly, well, give it a turn or add more carbon-rich materials. It’s easy to troubleshoot, it’s going to be okay.

How to Use Compost

Once you’ve made compost, you’ve got to decide what to do with it. Some folks compost as a way to get rid of food waste, while avid gardeners compost in order to have that rich, soil additive. “If you are not going to use it, maybe you have a neighbor or somebody that wants it,” says Platt. “But you can use it as mulch, you can use it to amend your soil, you can use it for houseplants, so there are lots of good uses for it.” If you are using a closed container system, such as a worm bin, a compost tumbler or a compost bin, eventually the pile will outsize its space and you will need to use the compost and start fresh. But if you have a large space of land, you can also compost continuously, watching the pile grow and your food waste shrink.

Top photo by Skórzewiak/ Adobe Stock.