By Katherine
I’ve been “composting” for about two years now, but only in the sense that I plunk my food scraps into a large bin in my yard and feel really good about myself for doing it.
I’ve never actually MADE compost for spreading around the garden. I think that would require aerating or watering the pile or upping the “browns” to “greens” ratio, or something like that.
Some composting advocates argue that there’s no science to composting—that one need not understand the details of decay, per se, to make it happen.
I suppose if you had one of those compost piles open to the elements with no lid—similar to what Rose Brown of The Zero Garbage Challenge has—the wind, rain and other magic nature things would probably make that rich, organic soil just happen.
But our lidded, plastic bin—which we acquired for free from a friend—must require some human intervention, because so far, nada.
The lid of the thing has a vent, but I’m not sure how and when to use it. Occasionally, I’ll go over and open the vent while I’m in the backyard with my daughter, just to set a good composting example for her. 
And when I’m feeling really ambitious, I’ll poke at the pile with my pitchfork, but so far, the haphazard venting-and-forking technique hasn’t yielded any results.
The pile has degraded for sure, but when I peer in, I’m greeted with the soggy, snaggletooth smile of my jack-o’-lantern circa 2009.
I WANT to make compost, and I WILL make compost. Someday. Just as soon as I relearn organic chemistry.
But here’s the thing: Now that I’ve taken The Zero Garbage Challenge workshop, I have more reasons to grow my unproductive compost pile: 75 more in fact!
That’s because, aside from learning that Rose Brown is my hero—she actually brought to the workshop her miniscule garbage from the last two years in little hand-sewn bags—I learned there are 75 things I could be composting that I’m probably not. Many of them are somewhat suspicious items I wouldn’t actually want to degrade into soil that I’d spread on my vegetable garden. Latex balloons? Um, latex condoms?
But did you know you could compost Post-it notes? Me neither! I thought the sticky glue part and neon colors meant no dice. And take-out pizza boxes? Can’t recycle those, because of the food stains, right? But you can compost them—gooey, cheese grease and all.
Turns out, garbage-reduction gurus know to have two compost piles at their pads:
- One gets fed with food scraps, garden waste and paper and cardboard products without weird glues, inks and grease stains for actually making rich humus for vegetable garden fertilizer, and
- Another gets fed with biodegradable stuff that might not make the most effective organic fertilizer but is hugely effective in decreasing your household’s contribution to the landfill. And the yield from this second, corrupted (for lack of a better term) compost pile can be used to fertilize nonedibles in your garden or yard.
So now at our house, instead of filling up a tiny countertop composter with food scraps and a giant kitchen garbage bag with everything else not recyclable, we’ve moved to filling up a large mixing bowl with all the stuff that we consume day-to-day that isn’t plastic. Every day or two, when I start to fear the fruit flies, I dump it into the outdoor compost bin.
And then I open and close the vent for good measure.
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which are fantastic for making some of the concepts more tangible. 
I have is made of stiff palm fibers, you can find them at Whole Foods or any local health store. I start with my feet and work up, as instructed, brushing towards the heart making sure to cover every part of the body. 
Heidi Swanson has some wonderful recipes, but what I have found most helpful is the section in the front about building a natural foods pantry. It has introduced me to a wide variety of grains, legumes, flours, oils and natual sweeteners. 
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