Thanks to a great idea from a friend, our family has decided to make one change a month toward living a greener, happier, healthier life. Our June change was to start composting. At this time I am no expert on composting, but I hope to give you more information about it in the future. There are a number of ways that composting can be done. You can simply have an open box and just add straw to cover everything that you’re composting. That is a very inexpensive way to compost. We have two dogs and have had a raccoon visit our house. For us, I knew that a closed rotating barrel would be the best option for our family. I also wanted something that would work properly and that was really easy to put together. We chose a rotating barrel made by Envirocycle, which was shipped as is and we didn’t have to do a thing to put it together. We just ordered it off of Amazon.com and was lucky enough to get free shipping. I placed my order for the Envirocycle on June 16, 2013. They said the estimated delivery date was between July 3rd-August 1st. I was pretty surprised that it would take that long. You can imagine how happy I was when it actually arrived three days later, on June 19th! All we have to do is fill our Norpro Grip Compost Keeper, take it outside to the Envirocyle, dump the contents and then rotate the barrel so that we get more oxygen in the barrel to help the contents decompose.
We were pretty surprised by how much we could actually add to the composting barrel. I finally feel like we are doing our part to help the environment. We throw so much away on a daily basis, it’s almost embarrassing! By composting, we have really cut down on what goes out to the landfills on garbage day. Right now we are adding kitchen scraps which consist of veggies, fruits and egg shells. Then we add paper towel, dryer lint, shells form nuts, grass clippings, tea bags, coffee grounds, coffee filters, toilet paper rolss and newspaper. My neighbor has straw that she’s not going to use, so I will start adding that to our barrel soon. Here is a list from TLC of 75 things you can compost. It’s pretty incredible, I think!
One thing that can make your composting life much easier and that I highly recommend getting is this Norpro Grip Compost Keeper for your kitchen. The filters help with the smell and of course the lid keeps fruit flies out! Once we fill it up we just take it out to the barrel, dump the contents and bring it back to the kitchen to fill up again. I think this was definitely a good, first change for our family.
All is well in our composting world!
