Prepping 101: How To Compost
Composting is a critical prepping skill, one that’s important to know (and do) whether in good times or bad.
There’s nothing better for a garden than good, quality compost, and a compost pile in your back yard is an outstanding, low-cost prep that saves you money even in good times (it reduces your garbage volume, which saves on bags and reduces the amount you send to a landfill).
Isn’t composting a lot of work?
Not really. In fact, it’s really no more work than putting your material in a trash bag and setting it out for pickup. Either way, you gather it up, you take it out of your house and you dispose of it.
Why bother composting?
Many preppers, myself included, keep a stock of seeds suitable for starting a garden. Well folks, if you plan to make that seed stock be more than a fisherman’s lure*, you’re going to have to feed that garden.
The sun provides the energy but the soil has to provide the minerals, and enough organic matter to hold water handy for the plant roots. If things go to pieces in a hurry, you won’t exactly be able to pop down to the store for some supplements.
This is an easy fertilizer solution, sure … but when the stuff hits the fan, you can’t count on getting the stuff from the store.
Keeping a compost bin serves multiple purposes:
- Using only material that would otherwise have been waste, you have a good source of minerals and organic matter perfect for improving the soil of your garden to get more food production.
- You have somewhere to put all that organic matter. If the trash truck isn’t coming, that will be a big thing. In good times, some municipalities still make getting rid of landscaping waste such as grass cuttings a pain, and reducing how much we have to landfill is a good thing.
- If needed, it’s quickly and easily converted into a human waste disposal system that’s sanitary, non-smelly, and effective. If you want this benefit, you’ll have to construct the bin with more care than is described here. See the Loveable Loo system for more details.
How to make a compost bin
I’m not trying to sell you a book, so I can admit it: This isn’t brain surgery. I made mine out of four pallets each (shipping pallets; stores get tons of them and sell them dirt cheap), wired together with fencing wire. For The Place with it’s minimal waste, that was it. For home, where I have a lot of garden waste, I put two bins side by side. I fill up one for a year and then start filling the other while I empty the composted remains of the first back into the garden.
I would put it out of sight of the Yard Police**, but it doesn’t stink or draw insects. (Insects that you or the neighbors would see and find objectionable, I mean. There are a lot of creepy crawlies of various description such as worms and sowbugs in the cooler parts of the old pile, but they stay in there and do a good job of changing waste to compost.) . In some places you may need to put a screen over the top to discourage squirrels or birds from raiding. I don’t bother; they do get in there from time to time but cause no harm.
A quick and cheap compost bin, four pallets wired together. It holds material well while allowing air movement.
How do you use the compost bin?
If you read up on compost bins, they can sound awfully complex, and talk about things like the need to turn the pile, balancing browns and greens, hot vs. cold, yadda yadda. When I first started gardening, managing all that seemed a bit much, so I just started tossing my vegetation scraps in the bin, leaving it for a year, and hoping for the best. It worked fine.
What do you need?
The real needs, as far as I can tell, are:
- Greens (fresh waste like grass clippings, rich in nitrogen) and some browns (drier material, such as end-of season garden remains), in roughly equal measure. Too much green and the pile gets really hot and makes too solid a mass; too much brown and there’s not enough water for the little organisms that convert waste to compost. This turns out not to be hard; during the spring when most things are greens I have a great place to mix in my waste from the paper shredder (counts as browns) and the rest of the year the mix matches what my garden makes.
- Some aeration. If you like to get your exercise without going to the gym, you Could use a fork (hay fork, not dinner) and turn the pile now and again. On the other hand, I find if I toss the small sticks that fall off of my trees every high wind into the pile, it keeps things from compacting and the pile stays oxygen-rich enough to get the non-stinky kind of composting.
- Enough water. I have to add some from time to time as my bins are under a big tree. If my pile doesn’t seem to be shrinking a couple of weeks after I’ve added more mass, it’s probably too dry so I stick the hose in a few spots for a few minutes each.
What goes in? Basically all plant waste. No meat or dairy scraps above trace levels, as they don’t suit the kinds of composting microorganisms I want. Paper shreddings can go too, so long as I have some greens to put in with them. Really hard things like peach stones or big sticks I pass on as they take too long to break down.
What are the downsides of composting?
I’ve never had any odor, and as I placed them out of easy sight, no complaints from neighbors.
This low-tech, low-effort method is slow though. It takes about a year for material to get to the point where I can spread it on the garden. This lines up with what a Chinese emperor was reported to say when told the trees he ordered wouldn’t mature for a hundred years: “So we must start Today!” It is also just a little more work to walk the collection bin I keep on the sink out to the back yard instead of just dumping stuff in the trash.
The other downside is that you don’t end up with a lot of compost from normal household waste, unless you’ve got a lot of landscaping debris such as grass clippings to go in there.
The kind of bin we’re talking here would give you a good boost the first year, during which you’d have to up your composting game for the subsequent years.
Oh, but wait! Have you seen the post for the Loveable Loo? In the kind of no-public-services-available situation many preppers prepare for, the Loo is a good hygiene answer that also produces a quantity of good compost.
I use a Loo as the current waste disposal system at The Place, although we’ll improve the system beyond the ‘ok for occasional use’ level seen in the pic below.
A nice, cheap weekend prep
Here’s a nice and cheap prep you can do this weekend: Set up a compost bin out back. Start tossing in all vegetable waste — no meat or dairy (it doesn’t compost well and tempts feral animals to rummage around and make a mess). Yard waste is great too. If there’s a lot of grass clippings at once, they’re very moist and green so you might actually do a tiny bit of ‘balancing’ by tossing in some dry plant material with them. Last year’s bagged dry leaves or paper bits nabbed from the shredder bin at work do well.
Until it’s time to garden, you just keep tossing stuff in; it rots down to make more room. A bonus upside is that you’re reducing landfill waste and recycling, too. Win Win!
*Fisherman’s lure = a lure good at attracting fishermen in the store, not fish in the pond
** Yard Police = homeowner’s associations or other busybodies that file complaints about the height of other people’s grass and si