What You’ll Need
Start with a compost bin, and put it somewhere in your back yard. Some communities and towns even sell these every once in a while at deep discounts to help promote composting (thereby reducing garbage collection and landfill burdens). You should also pick up a stainless steel container to temporarily hold kitchen scraps until you get them outside, a large garden fork to help stir (or “turn”) the pile, and of course a healthy supply of power tools to produce all the browns you’ll need to get the pile cooking. (“If you want better compost, dear, you’ll have to let me pick up that new thickness planer!”)
From the Home & Yard
Here’s where you’ll get a lot of your greens. When you’re preparing meals, open up your stainless steel container, and just dump all the unwanted, leftover plant materials you create. Do the same when you clean out the fridge – just because the lettuce is too old for you to eat, doesn’t mean it’s too old for the compost heap! You can chop up larger pieces to get things moving a bit quicker.
If you’re hooked on coffee, like me, pile on all the used coffee grounds and filters, too. Coffee grounds are a fantastic nitrogen-packed green, so when you visit your local coffee shop, ask for their used coffee grounds. Many Starbucks coffee locations even bag them up for you and place them by the door, marked “free.” If you’re not hooked on coffee, this is the perfect excuse to get hooked: Tell your significant other that buying that new espresso machine will help you save the world, then read my article on Making Perfect Mocha Syrup to get on the right track.
Now that you have some caffeine in you, run around the house gathering up dying flowers and plants, and cart that all out to the compost pile, too. And then go mow the lawn and throw the clippings in the mix as well. And if you’re lucky enough to live on the beach, grab some seaweed, too.