Composting Isn't a Bunch of Garbage

It’s week three of composting, and I’m amazed at how much less trash we have. When you’re not tossing cucumber peels, watermelon rinds, apple cores, coffee grounds and bread crusts in the garbage can, it really adds up. According to an Environmental Protection Agency website on composting, food scraps and yard waste make up almost a quarter of our country’s landfills. Imagine if everyone could start composting like we have and what a difference it would make.

Take us as a small sample of change. We used to put out a minimum of two bags of garbage in each of our twice-weekly trash pick ups. Now that we’re composting, we’re lucky if we’ve got two bags for the entire week.

Unlike our trash cans, our compost bin is filling up quite nicely. The grapes have turned white and green with mold, and the banana peels are brown and look quite slimy. We haven’t got any soil yet, though. I wonder how long until we’ve got bona fide dirt from our discarded food. Right now, it’s a festival of fruit flies, which my mom, the queen of composting, tells me is perfectly normal. I guess they’re part of the great circle of life in breaking down food scraps into soil. Maybe down that these fruit flies have got a place to buzz around outside, they’ll leave our bananas inside alone.