What's In The Garbage: We Started A Compost Pile!

Last week, I showed you our garden beginnings, along with a sneak peak at our compost pile (next to the garage in the picture above).  I had a whole list of questions about composting, and I still haven't found all of the answers to them.  But on April 22, which was Earth Day, we decided to jump in and start anyways.  Want to know what prompted that change?

The episode of Curious George on PBS that morning was about composting.  Real life here, folks.

The kids got excited about it, so we decided to start.  We gathered up the veggie scraps and egg shells we had so far, added some banana peels later in the day, and some grass clippings a few days later.

Now we have a bowl like this on the counter, and any extra scraps or peels or shells go in there.  Every day (or every other day if it's not too full), someone takes the bowl out and adds it to the pile.  I dump my coffee grounds directly on the pile when I make my cold brewed coffee every week since it's less messy that way.

This was what our pile looked like that first day.  Jesse had made a big batch of carrot apple celery juice, plus there were a few other bits.

The pile has already about tripled in size between the food scraps and the yard waste we've been cleaning up.  It's pretty cool to know that that free stuff will help our garden grow!

One positive benefit we've already seen is about a 1/3 reduction in our garbage, right off the bat!  I'm really excited for that to continue.  Between getting back into cloth diapering with Elizabeth, making sure to keep everything we can recycle out of the garbage, and now composting, we're at our goal of just one bag/week!

I'm sure there's still more that we can do to lessen our waste, but it's really cool that we made it to this goal in just a few months!