Our real composting began in earnest after many summer trips to the transfer station. We love the local summer melons, but there are few messes worse than melon rinds and seeds that have been sitting in your trash in the summer heat waiting for a transfer station trip. They quickly turn rancid and rotten and, at least for me, had a tendency to leak out of our trash bags all over the trunk of our car on my way to the transfer station. The smell was no perfume.

Then we heard that one of the local conservation commissions was selling composters for a bargain price and the pick up for these was even on the way to our favorite brew pub.

Our composter looks like one of the early space modules – a black cone shape with its pointy end cut off.

This composter turns out to be perfect for our postage stamp piece of property; we have it in back of the house where it gets a lot sun.

We put all of our kitchen waste in it and even this past winter our compost bin quickly worked on our grapefruit and other citrus skins, banana peels, as well as the usual coffee grounds, tea bags, various veggie peels, and more, making all of this disappear into compost mush rich with red worms, a composter’s dream.  The level in the compost was no higher this spring than it was before the winter began.

The trick is not to put too much garden waste on top of your kitchen offerings; this winter I was using fall leaves, but now we have plenty of garden weeds to cover the kitchen waste.

Come the fall, we should have lots of rich compost to spread on our gardens before next winter sets in, despite all of the rinds and peels and other waste from the summer and fall veggies and fruit we’ve contributed to it.

Another plus? Our composter means fewer trips to our transfer station and none with nasty rotten juice spills.