July 14, 2021 • 17 mins
We’re using this summer as an opportunity to dig into composting. We’ve heard a lot about this soil-enriching organic matter over the past two seasons, but there’s still a lot to learn about the science of compost and how you can actually get started in your own backyard. In this bonus episode, Mango gets insights from compost experts Cary Oshins and Tera Lewandowski. Cary is the Associate Director of the US Composting Council and Tera is a Senior Scientist at The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company.
For more helpful tips on composting, check out BonniePlants.com. Your friends at Miracle-Gro are collaboration partners with iHeart Radio for "Humans Growing Stuff."
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey there, I'm Mugisha together, a co host of Part
Time Genius, one of the founders of Mental Laws, and
this is Humans Growing Stuff, a collaboration from My Heart
Radio and your friends at Miracle Grow. Our goal is
to make this the most human show about plants you'll
ever listen to, and along the way, we'll share inspiring stories,
tips and tricks to nurture your plant addiction, and just
(00:27):
enough science to make you sound like an expert. So
we are on summer break right now, but the truth
is Molly and I can't stop our plant addiction, so
we're bringing you some sunny mini episodes to enjoy before
we return with a brand new season. Throughout this summer,
we'll be dropping incredible stories from growers, fun advice we
(00:48):
get from experts, and we'll even be bringing you along
on our field trips as we hunt all over Brooklyn
for a Polka Dot plant and learn about growing lavender
on Governor's Island. It is super fun. In today's bonus episode,
we're getting to the bottom of compost, from how to
do it, when to start, why it's so important to
soil health, and how it can help combat climate change.
(01:11):
So quick backstory when my family and I lived in Atlanta.
We would take our food scraps to a local farmers
market for collection to be turned into compost. But that's
kind of where my compost story begins and ends. But
after listening to our many guests and friends on the
show just talk at length about the benefits and meditative
(01:31):
nature of composting, I wanted to figure out what exactly
I needed to get started at home. So I called
up Tara Lewandowski and Carry Oceans. Tera is a senior
scientist with Scott's Miracle Grow, and Carry is an associate
director for the US Composting Council, and both are compost experts.
So if anyone could get me started, it's definitely these two.
(02:02):
Hey Tera, Hey Carry, are you there? Yeah, I'm here.
So I've always liked the idea of composting, and I
even used to drop off my food scraps at a
farmer's market in Atlanta. But um, during COVID that stopped
and I realized how much garbage I was generating. It's
it's really crazy, but you know, to be honest, I'm
still not that familiar with what composting actually is and
(02:24):
how it all works, and I'm a little hesitant to
just start, so I I'd love if you could explain,
you know, what compost is and the act of composting
to a newbie like me. Alright, So, at its core,
composting is taking the natural process of decomposition, which happens
when leaves fall to the ground and the forest or whatever,
(02:45):
and putting that into a concentrated location and managing managing
that to accelerate it. So we can put stuff into
a into a pile at home that could be you know,
instead of just a narrow layer, it's now in a pile.
And by putting in a pile you accelerate all those
processes and so things will decompose faster, and then in
the end you can end up with material that's kind
(03:08):
of like a soil. We call it a soil amendment,
something you would add to your soil to help improve
the soil's health. And then there's just a few basic principles.
So the work of the composting is being done by
millions and millions of micros, bacteria, fungi and other things.
And just like any animal husbandry, if you maintain a
herd of cows, you have to make sure that they're
(03:28):
all fed and housed, and keeping the micro hurt happy
and making sure they have the right amount of moisture,
which is just just a moist environment and making sure
it is enough for them they kind of build some
heat up and things don't get too dry, and they
have the right balance of nutrients, which is really just
we call them browns and greens, they're really represent carbon
(03:49):
and nitrogen. It's pretty simple at a at a small
level and at a home level, you can't get into
too much trouble. So that's the process of composting, and
encompost is just the end result to that process, and
it's something that is good for the soil. Helps helps
feed the soil, and feeding the soil you'll be feeding
your plants, so it's not really a direct fertilizer, but
(04:12):
it's something that helps your plants grow indirectly by helping
your soil grow. Can I ask why is composting so
essential to growing and gardening? So compostings away for us
to recycle carbon, nitrogen um and the micronutrients to get
them back to a form that the plants can use.
It is really important for us to make sure we're
(04:32):
reusing these organic inputs. People often think of a big
egg and how inputs are off taken from the field,
but not many are put back. And that's a great example,
but the same thing can happen at home. We want
to make sure that when you're gardening and you're taking
those organic inputs off, you're also putting something back. When
you add organic matter to the soil in these forms,
(04:53):
you end up with greater nutrient retention in the soil.
It's often known as canon exchange capacity. Sees you also
have carbon in the soil, and carbon is really important
not for the plants, but for the microbes in the soil.
The microbes are going to need that carbon for their processes,
but in breaking down the carbon, they're also breaking down
and p K and making it more available for the plant.
(05:15):
So very important for a couple of different reasons. I
had this incredible writer and thinker, Barton day Thurston on
and he was talking about his practice of composting, which
just sounded so romantic to me. He'd like go out
in the mornings after meditating and he'd take a cup
of coffee and he'd sort of spin the compost and
(05:36):
check the temperature, and and I had this very quiet
morning that was kind of based around his compost But
but I was curious, if I was just gonna start composting,
how would I do it. The best time to start
composting is in the fall, because there's usually fall leaves around,
and that's a good way to start. You we're going
to start other times a year. You need to kind
(05:58):
of you need to have those brown uh that high
carbon dry stuff that you're gonna add your food waste into,
so you you need you need to have that first.
You can just do it in a pile, and the
only problem with the pile is that takes up a
lot of space, So you contain a pile inside a
couple of palettes or a wire ring or something that
(06:18):
contains the space and makes it easier to build a pile.
Or you can get these commercial either bins or or
the fancier turners like you said you the bins that
are mounted and so can spin. Every state cooperative extension
office in the country has pretty good instructions on home
(06:40):
composting and they're all pretty reliable. So get a pamphlet
ahead will have the basic dues and don'ts and how
to start and what your options are, but there are
other variations. There's worm composting for people in apartments that
just really just have the food waste. They just want
to be or do the right thing and not send
their food waste to a landfill. Composting of the worms
(07:00):
called verma composting is an option. In the end, you
have to do something with this stuff that you've collected
and made in the compost. So if you don't have
a garden, you know you're gonna find a friend to
use it with. Uh, you know, you have to. Ultimately,
there's a lot of value in composting in terms of,
you know, for the for the planet, because we're keeping
(07:21):
the food waste out of landfills, and that causes methane,
which is a powerful greenhouse gas, depending on how you
measure it, either twenty five or a hundred times worse
than carbon dioxide. You might wonder why, well, why doesn't
that happen in a compost pile. Well, in our compost piles,
we work to keep it aerobic. We we work to
keep oxygen flowing to the microbes in the pile, and
(07:42):
methane only happens under strict anaerobic conditions. So if there's
air getting in, won't be creating methane. Landfills are designed
to keep air out. But in the end, as the
point is to make compost and to use the compost,
and so one way or another, you have to think
about what am I going to do of this stuff
once I have it. I love the idea of having
(08:03):
garden parties and giving out gift boxes to everyone who comes.
But um, so tell me a little bit more about
the worms, because I'm fascinated about by them. And we
talked to this wonderful person, Jamie Brennan from Gold Feather Gardens,
and she was talking about how worms can be essential
to the part of composting. So, okay, can you tell
(08:24):
me about how they contribute to the process. Yeah, so
you can do a dedicated box container that you get
the right kind of worms are called red wigglers. Once
they're active, they will eat half their weight every day
in food waste. So if you have a pound of worms,
which might be a thousand or two thousand worms, they
will eat half a pound of food every day. It
(08:46):
is somewhat miraculous, Like where did it go? Depending on
of your single person or family four, depending how much
you're feeding them. Eventually it kind of gets all composed
and then you have to do something with it. That's
a that's another story. But if you're comp us is
on the ground, which most people, unless it's in a
tumbler off the ground, you will get worms working their
way into their compost pile. You'll get sal bugs and
(09:08):
other things. At a commercial facility, we don't get any
of those because it's too hot. But at a home
compost pile, yeah, you get. You get a whole food web.
You get you get little mites, you hat sal bugs,
you get all kinds of things that will be living
in your compost pile. Then they're all good. They're all
helping part of the food web of the compost pile.
There's a great book called Worms Eat My Garbage by
(09:28):
Marry apple Hof, and that is like the worm composters Bible.
Tell everything you need to know about how to do it,
what to do with it when you're done, what are problems.
It's a great it's a great resource. So you mentioned critters,
and I'm curious, how involved should possum or raccoons be
in my compost pile. They shouldn't be. We try to
(09:51):
get them out and that's why if you're in an
area that has those things, putting your compost in a
bin in an enclosure, well we'll keep them out. In
an urban city, you want to rat proof beIN right,
and rats can get through a hole like the size
of a of a quarter. What are some things we
can compost and what surprising that we can't. Anything that
(10:17):
was once alive or produced by living things can be composted.
And you may have heard in some of the states
in the Northwest now they allow composting of human bodies
instead of funerals, so you can compost anything that was
once alive. Now at the home scale, that's a different
story because you're not getting the heat, you're you're not
getting the controls that you have at a big scale.
(10:39):
And so generally we say to keep to things that
we're growing like leaves, brush, grass, weeds, and from the
kitchen anything that was vegetative in nature, and try to
avoid too much dairy or meat or oils. Some people
will be very persticaty about this, and you know, really
(11:02):
only do like coffee grounds and tea and and the
carrot tops and things like that. Others of us are
not so worried about it. And so a little bit
of cheese or a little bit of meat or a
little bit of oil from a salad dressing really is
fine as long as especially as long as you're burying
it into your pile and not having it exposed. And
(11:24):
I'm sure you're going to get some questions about that,
because some people will really disagree with me. I am
a fairly lazy composter or I mean, you can really
be aggressive in your composting and turn it frequently and
mix it up and make composts fast, or you could
be a lazy compostor like me. I might turn my
compost pile once a year, just when it gets so
full I can't add anymore in. That's when I have
(11:47):
to start a new bin. And that's one thing that
people have to figure it out, is if they have
a single bin and they're adding food every every couple
of days or once a week, when do they stop?
How do they get their compost out? And so ultimately
that you have to kind of start a second bin
so you can let the first bin finish. I guess
that's that's one of my That's one of my questions too,
(12:07):
is like how do you know when it's ready. It's
it's tricky because the outside doesn't finish. I mean, the
stuff on the very outside always looks like it's not decomposed.
You have to you have to look inside to find it.
Stuff breaks down. Compost happens after a few months and
a pile. The stuff at the botto of your pile
that you can't see will be compost. Take the raw
(12:29):
stuff off the edges and off the top, and then
you'll have your finished compost. So the add to this
um it goes back to your question on cadence of
when to start composting. So most people are going to
be wanting to add compost to their garden in the spring,
right like when they're starting their garden. If you back
out from that, you're gonna want at minimum I would
(12:50):
guess six months and some of these piles, I mean
that's a minimum. So when Carrie's saying, like when you
should stop adding to a pile, fall might be a
good time to consider doing that. For what you want
to use in the spring to start a new pile
to then add to a different cadence could be every year.
Maybe you run a pile for a year and then
you let it sit for a year. It kind of
(13:11):
depends how much you're putting in, how big your storage
area is, and when you want to use it. I
think everyone's going to be a little different there. And
the other thing I'd like to add is when you're
talking about inputs with the compostable products that are, we're
all very excited to be seeing them reducing waste to landfill.
For the home compost or, it's a bit tricky. I
(13:31):
can't say that you can't compost them, but it's going
to depend on how you're composting, how active you are
with that pile, with turning it and wetting it, how
long it's sitting there. And if you don't like seeing
pieces of cardboard or cup or some of that compost
full stuff in your finished compost, you may not want
to use them. They're primarily formulated for municipal or large
(13:55):
scale composting facilities that do have the time and temperature
to really break them down. Well, I love that you've
advocated and made space for the lazy composter because that
feels very much my lane, even though I love the
romance of like composting daily uh and the way Barryton
Day does it. I probably feel the same way about
the gym where I shouldn't be going every day but
(14:18):
but don't. But so if someone was on the fence
about composting, what is your quick pitch for why they
should get into it. That's a great question. So we
all have organic waste that we're producing, and you're sending
a high volume of materials, of possibly stinky material that
sitting in your trash. You're sending it to landfill, and
often you're putting it in a plastic bag, and at
(14:39):
that point decomposition is slow to stop, especially when it
gets into the ante over part of the landfill. We're
just losing nutrients. That way, you could take that material
compost it at home. For one, you're going to significantly
reduce the weight, the smell, the mass of product you're
saying to the landfill. So you're paying for trash. That
(15:01):
right there is a win. But secondly, it can be
as involved or as uninvolved, as lazy as you say,
magna as you want it to be. It does not
have to be a big deal. You can easily start
a static pile and just add to it for a year,
and then you can add with very minimal effort and
still have a successful pile. Of just making a hole
(15:21):
in that pile and put your food waste in and
covering it up, maybe adding some water once a week,
that could go a long way, and you could be
all the way from that to a very involved composter.
But it doesn't need to be a big production in
your life in order to have a really positive effect
on the environment. There is a lot of things that
are readily accessible to every person to do to address
(15:45):
climate change. Keeping food out of landfills is one of them.
On that is really accessible to a lot of people.
And unlike other kinds of recycling, where if you put
a bottle in your recycling bind, it's going to go
thousands of thousands of miles to a processor, to a
converter eventually end up as other product, compost stays local.
(16:06):
Keeping it at home is the most local you can be.
But even sending it to our commercial facility, it's going
to be within fifty or a hundred miles of you.
And then less it ends up in a bag of
scots and might go five thousand miles, it's probably gonna
end up within fifty or a hundred miles from where
it started. And so that's a real advantage just on
the process side, and then you've got all the benefits
(16:26):
of the product itself. Tara talked about the nutrients, but
there's other things that does for the soil. Soil that
has a lot of organic matter, and it can absorb
rain easier, it holds onto the rain longer, it's easier
to work, it's easier to garden. So there's all kinds
of benefits that come both with the process and with
the product. Thank you both for hanging out with me
(16:47):
and talking compost today. Happy to do it at a
great time. Thanks sank. I want to thank Tara Lewandowski
and Karay Oceans again for sharing all their incredible knowledge
about compost. You can learn even more about composting at
the US Composting Council's website at Composting Council dot org.
(17:11):
That's it for today's bonus episode, but check back here
again soon for more bonus episodes this summer. And don't
forget no matter what season it is or where you're
at in your gardening journey, there's some incredible resources waiting
for you on the Miracle Grow website. Humans Growing Stuff
is a collaboration from I Heart Radio and your friends
(17:31):
at Miracle Grow. Our show is written and produced by
Molly Sosha and Ni Mongayatigler. Our editor and engineer on
this episode was Matt Stillo. Thank you so much for listening.
Hey there, I'm Mugisha together, a co host of Part
Time Genius, one of the founders of Mental Laws, and
this is Humans Growing Stuff, a collaboration from My Heart
Radio and your friends at Miracle Grow. Our goal is
to make this the most human show about plants you'll
ever listen to, and along the way, we'll share inspiring stories,
tips and tricks to nurture your plant addiction, and just
(00:27):
enough science to make you sound like an expert. So
we are on summer break right now, but the truth
is Molly and I can't stop our plant addiction, so
we're bringing you some sunny mini episodes to enjoy before
we return with a brand new season. Throughout this summer,
we'll be dropping incredible stories from growers, fun advice we
(00:48):
get from experts, and we'll even be bringing you along
on our field trips as we hunt all over Brooklyn
for a Polka Dot plant and learn about growing lavender
on Governor's Island. It is super fun. In today's bonus episode,
we're getting to the bottom of compost, from how to
do it, when to start, why it's so important to
soil health, and how it can help combat climate change.
(01:11):
So quick backstory when my family and I lived in Atlanta.
We would take our food scraps to a local farmers
market for collection to be turned into compost. But that's
kind of where my compost story begins and ends. But
after listening to our many guests and friends on the
show just talk at length about the benefits and meditative
(01:31):
nature of composting, I wanted to figure out what exactly
I needed to get started at home. So I called
up Tara Lewandowski and Carry Oceans. Tera is a senior
scientist with Scott's Miracle Grow, and Carry is an associate
director for the US Composting Council, and both are compost experts.
So if anyone could get me started, it's definitely these two.
(02:02):
Hey Tera, Hey Carry, are you there? Yeah, I'm here.
So I've always liked the idea of composting, and I
even used to drop off my food scraps at a
farmer's market in Atlanta. But um, during COVID that stopped
and I realized how much garbage I was generating. It's
it's really crazy, but you know, to be honest, I'm
still not that familiar with what composting actually is and
(02:24):
how it all works, and I'm a little hesitant to
just start, so I I'd love if you could explain,
you know, what compost is and the act of composting
to a newbie like me. Alright, So, at its core,
composting is taking the natural process of decomposition, which happens
when leaves fall to the ground and the forest or whatever,
(02:45):
and putting that into a concentrated location and managing managing
that to accelerate it. So we can put stuff into
a into a pile at home that could be you know,
instead of just a narrow layer, it's now in a pile.
And by putting in a pile you accelerate all those
processes and so things will decompose faster, and then in
the end you can end up with material that's kind
(03:08):
of like a soil. We call it a soil amendment,
something you would add to your soil to help improve
the soil's health. And then there's just a few basic principles.
So the work of the composting is being done by
millions and millions of micros, bacteria, fungi and other things.
And just like any animal husbandry, if you maintain a
herd of cows, you have to make sure that they're
(03:28):
all fed and housed, and keeping the micro hurt happy
and making sure they have the right amount of moisture,
which is just just a moist environment and making sure
it is enough for them they kind of build some
heat up and things don't get too dry, and they
have the right balance of nutrients, which is really just
we call them browns and greens, they're really represent carbon
(03:49):
and nitrogen. It's pretty simple at a at a small
level and at a home level, you can't get into
too much trouble. So that's the process of composting, and
encompost is just the end result to that process, and
it's something that is good for the soil. Helps helps
feed the soil, and feeding the soil you'll be feeding
your plants, so it's not really a direct fertilizer, but
(04:12):
it's something that helps your plants grow indirectly by helping
your soil grow. Can I ask why is composting so
essential to growing and gardening? So compostings away for us
to recycle carbon, nitrogen um and the micronutrients to get
them back to a form that the plants can use.
It is really important for us to make sure we're
(04:32):
reusing these organic inputs. People often think of a big
egg and how inputs are off taken from the field,
but not many are put back. And that's a great example,
but the same thing can happen at home. We want
to make sure that when you're gardening and you're taking
those organic inputs off, you're also putting something back. When
you add organic matter to the soil in these forms,
(04:53):
you end up with greater nutrient retention in the soil.
It's often known as canon exchange capacity. Sees you also
have carbon in the soil, and carbon is really important
not for the plants, but for the microbes in the soil.
The microbes are going to need that carbon for their processes,
but in breaking down the carbon, they're also breaking down
and p K and making it more available for the plant.
(05:15):
So very important for a couple of different reasons. I
had this incredible writer and thinker, Barton day Thurston on
and he was talking about his practice of composting, which
just sounded so romantic to me. He'd like go out
in the mornings after meditating and he'd take a cup
of coffee and he'd sort of spin the compost and
(05:36):
check the temperature, and and I had this very quiet
morning that was kind of based around his compost But
but I was curious, if I was just gonna start composting,
how would I do it. The best time to start
composting is in the fall, because there's usually fall leaves around,
and that's a good way to start. You we're going
to start other times a year. You need to kind
(05:58):
of you need to have those brown uh that high
carbon dry stuff that you're gonna add your food waste into,
so you you need you need to have that first.
You can just do it in a pile, and the
only problem with the pile is that takes up a
lot of space, So you contain a pile inside a
couple of palettes or a wire ring or something that
(06:18):
contains the space and makes it easier to build a pile.
Or you can get these commercial either bins or or
the fancier turners like you said you the bins that
are mounted and so can spin. Every state cooperative extension
office in the country has pretty good instructions on home
(06:40):
composting and they're all pretty reliable. So get a pamphlet
ahead will have the basic dues and don'ts and how
to start and what your options are, but there are
other variations. There's worm composting for people in apartments that
just really just have the food waste. They just want
to be or do the right thing and not send
their food waste to a landfill. Composting of the worms
(07:00):
called verma composting is an option. In the end, you
have to do something with this stuff that you've collected
and made in the compost. So if you don't have
a garden, you know you're gonna find a friend to
use it with. Uh, you know, you have to. Ultimately,
there's a lot of value in composting in terms of,
you know, for the for the planet, because we're keeping
(07:21):
the food waste out of landfills, and that causes methane,
which is a powerful greenhouse gas, depending on how you
measure it, either twenty five or a hundred times worse
than carbon dioxide. You might wonder why, well, why doesn't
that happen in a compost pile. Well, in our compost piles,
we work to keep it aerobic. We we work to
keep oxygen flowing to the microbes in the pile, and
(07:42):
methane only happens under strict anaerobic conditions. So if there's
air getting in, won't be creating methane. Landfills are designed
to keep air out. But in the end, as the
point is to make compost and to use the compost,
and so one way or another, you have to think
about what am I going to do of this stuff
once I have it. I love the idea of having
(08:03):
garden parties and giving out gift boxes to everyone who comes.
But um, so tell me a little bit more about
the worms, because I'm fascinated about by them. And we
talked to this wonderful person, Jamie Brennan from Gold Feather Gardens,
and she was talking about how worms can be essential
to the part of composting. So, okay, can you tell
(08:24):
me about how they contribute to the process. Yeah, so
you can do a dedicated box container that you get
the right kind of worms are called red wigglers. Once
they're active, they will eat half their weight every day
in food waste. So if you have a pound of worms,
which might be a thousand or two thousand worms, they
will eat half a pound of food every day. It
(08:46):
is somewhat miraculous, Like where did it go? Depending on
of your single person or family four, depending how much
you're feeding them. Eventually it kind of gets all composed
and then you have to do something with it. That's
a that's another story. But if you're comp us is
on the ground, which most people, unless it's in a
tumbler off the ground, you will get worms working their
way into their compost pile. You'll get sal bugs and
(09:08):
other things. At a commercial facility, we don't get any
of those because it's too hot. But at a home
compost pile, yeah, you get. You get a whole food web.
You get you get little mites, you hat sal bugs,
you get all kinds of things that will be living
in your compost pile. Then they're all good. They're all
helping part of the food web of the compost pile.
There's a great book called Worms Eat My Garbage by
(09:28):
Marry apple Hof, and that is like the worm composters Bible.
Tell everything you need to know about how to do it,
what to do with it when you're done, what are problems.
It's a great it's a great resource. So you mentioned critters,
and I'm curious, how involved should possum or raccoons be
in my compost pile. They shouldn't be. We try to
(09:51):
get them out and that's why if you're in an
area that has those things, putting your compost in a
bin in an enclosure, well we'll keep them out. In
an urban city, you want to rat proof beIN right,
and rats can get through a hole like the size
of a of a quarter. What are some things we
can compost and what surprising that we can't. Anything that
(10:17):
was once alive or produced by living things can be composted.
And you may have heard in some of the states
in the Northwest now they allow composting of human bodies
instead of funerals, so you can compost anything that was
once alive. Now at the home scale, that's a different
story because you're not getting the heat, you're you're not
getting the controls that you have at a big scale.
(10:39):
And so generally we say to keep to things that
we're growing like leaves, brush, grass, weeds, and from the
kitchen anything that was vegetative in nature, and try to
avoid too much dairy or meat or oils. Some people
will be very persticaty about this, and you know, really
(11:02):
only do like coffee grounds and tea and and the
carrot tops and things like that. Others of us are
not so worried about it. And so a little bit
of cheese or a little bit of meat or a
little bit of oil from a salad dressing really is
fine as long as especially as long as you're burying
it into your pile and not having it exposed. And
(11:24):
I'm sure you're going to get some questions about that,
because some people will really disagree with me. I am
a fairly lazy composter or I mean, you can really
be aggressive in your composting and turn it frequently and
mix it up and make composts fast, or you could
be a lazy compostor like me. I might turn my
compost pile once a year, just when it gets so
full I can't add anymore in. That's when I have
(11:47):
to start a new bin. And that's one thing that
people have to figure it out, is if they have
a single bin and they're adding food every every couple
of days or once a week, when do they stop?
How do they get their compost out? And so ultimately
that you have to kind of start a second bin
so you can let the first bin finish. I guess
that's that's one of my That's one of my questions too,
(12:07):
is like how do you know when it's ready. It's
it's tricky because the outside doesn't finish. I mean, the
stuff on the very outside always looks like it's not decomposed.
You have to you have to look inside to find it.
Stuff breaks down. Compost happens after a few months and
a pile. The stuff at the botto of your pile
that you can't see will be compost. Take the raw
(12:29):
stuff off the edges and off the top, and then
you'll have your finished compost. So the add to this
um it goes back to your question on cadence of
when to start composting. So most people are going to
be wanting to add compost to their garden in the spring,
right like when they're starting their garden. If you back
out from that, you're gonna want at minimum I would
(12:50):
guess six months and some of these piles, I mean
that's a minimum. So when Carrie's saying, like when you
should stop adding to a pile, fall might be a
good time to consider doing that. For what you want
to use in the spring to start a new pile
to then add to a different cadence could be every year.
Maybe you run a pile for a year and then
you let it sit for a year. It kind of
(13:11):
depends how much you're putting in, how big your storage
area is, and when you want to use it. I
think everyone's going to be a little different there. And
the other thing I'd like to add is when you're
talking about inputs with the compostable products that are, we're
all very excited to be seeing them reducing waste to landfill.
For the home compost or, it's a bit tricky. I
(13:31):
can't say that you can't compost them, but it's going
to depend on how you're composting, how active you are
with that pile, with turning it and wetting it, how
long it's sitting there. And if you don't like seeing
pieces of cardboard or cup or some of that compost
full stuff in your finished compost, you may not want
to use them. They're primarily formulated for municipal or large
(13:55):
scale composting facilities that do have the time and temperature
to really break them down. Well, I love that you've
advocated and made space for the lazy composter because that
feels very much my lane, even though I love the
romance of like composting daily uh and the way Barryton
Day does it. I probably feel the same way about
the gym where I shouldn't be going every day but
(14:18):
but don't. But so if someone was on the fence
about composting, what is your quick pitch for why they
should get into it. That's a great question. So we
all have organic waste that we're producing, and you're sending
a high volume of materials, of possibly stinky material that
sitting in your trash. You're sending it to landfill, and
often you're putting it in a plastic bag, and at
(14:39):
that point decomposition is slow to stop, especially when it
gets into the ante over part of the landfill. We're
just losing nutrients. That way, you could take that material
compost it at home. For one, you're going to significantly
reduce the weight, the smell, the mass of product you're
saying to the landfill. So you're paying for trash. That
(15:01):
right there is a win. But secondly, it can be
as involved or as uninvolved, as lazy as you say,
magna as you want it to be. It does not
have to be a big deal. You can easily start
a static pile and just add to it for a year,
and then you can add with very minimal effort and
still have a successful pile. Of just making a hole
(15:21):
in that pile and put your food waste in and
covering it up, maybe adding some water once a week,
that could go a long way, and you could be
all the way from that to a very involved composter.
But it doesn't need to be a big production in
your life in order to have a really positive effect
on the environment. There is a lot of things that
are readily accessible to every person to do to address
(15:45):
climate change. Keeping food out of landfills is one of them.
On that is really accessible to a lot of people.
And unlike other kinds of recycling, where if you put
a bottle in your recycling bind, it's going to go
thousands of thousands of miles to a processor, to a
converter eventually end up as other product, compost stays local.
(16:06):
Keeping it at home is the most local you can be.
But even sending it to our commercial facility, it's going
to be within fifty or a hundred miles of you.
And then less it ends up in a bag of
scots and might go five thousand miles, it's probably gonna
end up within fifty or a hundred miles from where
it started. And so that's a real advantage just on
the process side, and then you've got all the benefits
(16:26):
of the product itself. Tara talked about the nutrients, but
there's other things that does for the soil. Soil that
has a lot of organic matter, and it can absorb
rain easier, it holds onto the rain longer, it's easier
to work, it's easier to garden. So there's all kinds
of benefits that come both with the process and with
the product. Thank you both for hanging out with me
(16:47):
and talking compost today. Happy to do it at a
great time. Thanks sank. I want to thank Tara Lewandowski
and Karay Oceans again for sharing all their incredible knowledge
about compost. You can learn even more about composting at
the US Composting Council's website at Composting Council dot org.
(17:11):
That's it for today's bonus episode, but check back here
again soon for more bonus episodes this summer. And don't
forget no matter what season it is or where you're
at in your gardening journey, there's some incredible resources waiting
for you on the Miracle Grow website. Humans Growing Stuff
is a collaboration from I Heart Radio and your friends
(17:31):
at Miracle Grow. Our show is written and produced by
Molly Sosha and Ni Mongayatigler. Our editor and engineer on
this episode was Matt Stillo. Thank you so much for listening.
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