Home Composting - Compost Indoors For Pennies On The Dollar

People that live in the cities are more than likely not going to believe that they have the option of growing their very own compost from within the confines of their home. If gardening is a hobby of yours, yet you believe that you could not garden from your apartment or house, let me help you change your mind. By purchasing a few containers at your local convenience store and creating your very own home composting system that can be set up in your closet, you will be well on your way to achieving your gardening dream in your urban area no matter where you live. Here is a simple solution that will show you how to create a composting system in your home.

The first thing that you will need is some kind of a space in your house that you do not regularly access that can be used for storage of one or two containers. These containers will be like large Tupperware containers, about 1 foot tall, by 18 inches high, by two feet in length. In these containers you will place a sizable amount of dirt, some composting material which we will talk about later, newspaper, water, and some red worms.

The other thing you will need is an ample source of organic material that either comes from your neighbors across the hallway or street, or, if you have a large family, right from your kitchen table. If you are a coffee drinker, all the better. You can use coffee grounds, your uneaten food scraps, and your daily newspaper to get yourself started.

The first thing you will need to do is line the bottom of your large containers with some newspaper. Next, you will need to add some soil or bedding makes with some kind of organic food scraps and perhaps a little peat moss. This should come up about halfway to the top of the container. Next, you will want to add to red worms. Make sure they are covered slightly by a layer of wet bedding and then on top of that add your organic waste. You will also want to add supplemental moisture if the bedding is too dry (it should resemble a wet, wrung out sponge) and mix the soil up a bit with your hand in order to get proper aeration throughout the soil for the worms.

Before you take your containers into your storage area, make sure that you have punched holes in various areas of the container near the top and on the lid so that the worms have air. You already ran your fingers or some kind of instrument through the soil to loosen it up so that the aerobic breakdown of organics may begin. Once you have done that, take your container or containers into the room you have created for them, and let the process began.

The type of organic waste you should put on top should be something like egg shells for calcium, beans for protein, and common vegetable scraps that you could not finish. You should never add any kind of dairy products such as cheese or yogurt and never add any meat products, oils, and fats. Allow two to three weeks for the worms to process the food and add some more at that point, always remembering to aerate the dirt.

You will notice after a few weeks that bedding and scraps have begun to change into a soft and moist consistency and that after a few months, depending on your worm population and initial amount of worms, you should be able to process a sizable bag of worm generated compost that you can use in your garden or containers that you have purchased if you have decided to grow more food in your home. This would make sense because you are creating fertilizer within your home and this would simply be a process of waste transformation.

Once done, you may notice that you have a few more worms. Over time, you may want to increase the size of your home composting system and upgrade to four containers to produce twice as much. Using the same set of guidelines, do the process over again. The only thing you will need is an excess source of organic waste in order to perpetuate this process.

Home composting can be done outside but then it would not technically be composting within your home. By using portable bins that are easily stackable, you could utilize an unused room of your home and actually begin your own composting business. As the process continues, it will not have any negative effects because nothing smells bad and everything is processed in an aerobic manner if done properly.

More than likely, the home composting idea has limitations based upon the amount of space you have and your goals as far as growing crops or plants within the home. You will probably only need a few bins to sustain enough compost for yourself on an annual basis and therefore it is more of a hobby than a business.

If you decide to expand your home composting into a monetizeable scenario, you will definitely need to move everything into the garage and make sure that the temperature stays around 70 degrees so that the breeding and processing that the worms must do may continue outside of the confines of the home. Either way, it is a fun activity that helps the environment and will also generate excess compost or cash for you.