Composting in my Apartment
Closing in on a month in my new apartment, I've been doing pretty well. Been feeding myself, not feeling like a *complete* idiot at the grocery store, doing my homework 1+ day ahead of time. It's been worse.
One of my gripes with living in an apartment is the lack of our houses compost. It's one of those stupid little things that is a trained reflex, but I never really expect to use.
What I already know:
Composing *should* be a smell free activity. The only reason why composts start smelling bad is because there is too much moisture and it has turned anaerobic. Your plum tree just dropped all its fruit? Don't compost it. That much fresh fruit has way too much water in it; it'll ruin your pile.
I've also gotten quite good training on what is and isn't compostable. Most surprising for me: egg shells. Go refresh what you can put in a compost.
What I want to know:
How small can you really scale down compost? You could argue that it could go as small as you wanted, it just wouldn't be very resistant to getting filled before it got a chance of getting started...
Composting Indoors - They say bare minimum is 10-20 gallons. That's pretty big for sitting in our apartment. Probably what I was the happiest with that this setup which consists of two 5 gallon buckets. That seems like a nice middle ground between big and small, yet is still non-free.
So for now I've cut the top off a 2L soda bottle I had sitting around. I've pretty much completely filled it with one afternoon of waste, but if all else I can just ignore it until it reduces some... we'll see how completely this falls on its face.
UPDATE: Oh shiza! Less than 24 hours into it, we got a fruit fly outbreak, that we're still suffering from several days later. New plan: 5 gallon bucket on the porch, with lid.
One of my gripes with living in an apartment is the lack of our houses compost. It's one of those stupid little things that is a trained reflex, but I never really expect to use.
What I already know:
Composing *should* be a smell free activity. The only reason why composts start smelling bad is because there is too much moisture and it has turned anaerobic. Your plum tree just dropped all its fruit? Don't compost it. That much fresh fruit has way too much water in it; it'll ruin your pile.
I've also gotten quite good training on what is and isn't compostable. Most surprising for me: egg shells. Go refresh what you can put in a compost.
What I want to know:
How small can you really scale down compost? You could argue that it could go as small as you wanted, it just wouldn't be very resistant to getting filled before it got a chance of getting started...
Composting Indoors - They say bare minimum is 10-20 gallons. That's pretty big for sitting in our apartment. Probably what I was the happiest with that this setup which consists of two 5 gallon buckets. That seems like a nice middle ground between big and small, yet is still non-free.
So for now I've cut the top off a 2L soda bottle I had sitting around. I've pretty much completely filled it with one afternoon of waste, but if all else I can just ignore it until it reduces some... we'll see how completely this falls on its face.
UPDATE: Oh shiza! Less than 24 hours into it, we got a fruit fly outbreak, that we're still suffering from several days later. New plan: 5 gallon bucket on the porch, with lid.
