This video is an excellent reference for beginners who want to start making compost. Thanks Howdini and Organic Gardening Magazine for this information.

Patti Moreno, the Garden Girl, shows you how easy it is to build a worm composting bin. Don’t toss those kitchen scraps, start feeding them to the worms. Kids love watching worms and this is fun project to do with them.

A year later….

I found this article on Susan Harris’ Sustainable Gardening blog. Interesting read on Apartment Composting By Elizabeth Haegele. She takes her kitchen scraps and newspapers to her community garden. She uses a countertop compost pail to store kitchen scraps. Kitchen compost pails with a carbon filter keep odors out while you collect your scraps all week long. Empty it when full in your outdoor compost bin. Look for a tumbling composter that is self contained if you are trying to keep out critters which are attracted to kitchen scraps.

Sunchips new compost bag is coming in 2010. I really like these chips and now the bag will be fully compostable. Check out the video.

From National Geographic Video, this composting video shows you how to make a simple compost bin from mesh wire.

In these tough economic times, making a compost bin can save money while still providing you with all the benefits of composting. Composting improves the health of your soil, increases yield, reduces weeds and add nutrients. Whether you use a fancy composting tumbler or just a wire mesh ring, composting is one of the single best things you can do to improve your soil.

For me, one of the biggest obstacles to adding kitchen scraps to your compost bin is remembering to save the scraps. When preparing meals, it helps to have a designated pail, bowl or bucket to store your scraps in between trips to your outdoor compost bin. There are many kitchen composting pails on the market, and I find that ones with the charcoal filter lid works best for me. It eliminates odors. I prefer to add the scraps one or twice a week to the compost pile.

Okay, I must admit that the regular size Biobag Dog Waste Bags would never work with my two labs. Needless to say, one is 110 lbs. Now that the Dog Waste bags come in a large size for bigger dogs, I gave them a try. They WORK! Easy to use, easy to tie and they are 100% compostable and 100% biodegradable.

In the old days, I would use the plastic grocery store bags for pet waste. (That was before my Envirosax Bags came along) Hey at least I was reusing… I thought. Problem is it takes a lot of petroleum to make them and they are not biodegradable. So I was putting something that was biodegradable, pet waste, into plastic bags that was not, bound for the landfill. It just did not make sense.

Now with Biobags, made from corn, it is easy and I can feel good about disposing of it. Next project is a Pet Poo Worm Composter!

Today we received our worms for our Tumbleweed worm farm. We had been waiting for them to arrive. The first thing I did was to open the top compartment of my composter and place several layers of wet newspaper. Then it was time for the fun part, the worms. I opened the box and gently dumped all of them, with the castings to cover the wet newspaper. We had been using our Kitchen Composter (kc2000) to collect our coffee grounds and vegetable scraps from our lunches. So after the worms were nice and settled, I did mist the castings with water to ensure that they were damp. I spread the kitchen scraps over the worms, placed a wet piece of cardboard to fit the inside of the composter, on top of it all and closed the lid. The worms like a nice dark damp place to do their handiwork. They don’t actually eat the scraps, but feed on the bacteria from the decomposing matter. We then placed the composter on a small shelf, so that we could collect the liquid from the bottom box. And that was all there was to it.

Laura Bristol, Director of Operations at Olive Barn took the challenge and assembled our best selling Tumbleweed Compost Tumbler in just under 10 minutes. Here she is proudly showing off her accomplishment.

Composting is good for the environment, and your soil.