With the new planting season, why not put together the compost bin that had been purchased a few months ago? It took about 10 minutes and voila, the bin was ready to cook up our organic compost. However, as difficulties are inevitable in any great project, we realized that we. did. not. know. how to make compost. The only piece of knowledge we had was we needed leftover food. Is it obvious that we are completely oblivious amateur green thumbs?
The past decade was not a bearer of good news. But it did introduce the mass to google and youtube. Where would we be without them? We would have to resort to driving to the local library to turn the tangible pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica, look up gardening books, or call close/distant relatives and friends who have gardening experience... which are extremely rare in our circle. We googled and youtubed our way into composting and learned that the two integral ingredients in making compost are the "brown" and "green" materials.
To break it down, the "brown" materials consist of dry leaves, twigs, straw, hay, and etc. The "green" materials are basically fruits, vegetables, coffee grounds, grass clippings, fresh manure, and etc. Sine we already knew that compost would consist of some type of left over food, we already had some left over carrots and green leaf vegetables from earlier in the day(we drink carrot & green leaf juice). The problem was the BROWNS. Where were we suppose to find dry leaves, twigs, straw, or hay? Maybe it was the "city" in us that we just could not fathom finding any of the above in March. It had just snowed and didn't they clear the leaves on our street back in the fall? We tell you... we're hopeless. So after 30 minutes of craiglisting(another great cyber community introduced in the last decade) and googling, we decided to look around our neighborhood for something of the "browns." And yes, we succeeded... to the core. The mini "woodland" in our neighborhood was not even 3 minutes from our house!
We filled 4 Wholefood brown bags and 2 trash bags worth of dry leaves. So with our "brown" materials in tow, we headed home to fill our compost bin with the browns and greens. Oh, there's also a ratio which we are still unsure of. One youtuber said, 3(brown):1(green), another said half and half, and another said 1:3, and there are scores of other suggestions. We decided to fill the bin with more browns than greens. Sometimes, you just have to go with your instinct! And if you fail miserably, at least you learned a good lesson. :)
The photo op was last minute(as is the creation of this blog)... really... the whole compost thing was a last minute idea, and we were quite proud and thankful to have put together our first compost. It's overly cliched but never underrated; at the end of the day, we were grateful that we had eachother to share this experience with.
Now... will it cook up good compost? . . .
