Kitchen Composter

For the want of an extension cord, the composter was moved.

For want of a plug, the composter moved even further, into the deep dark recesses of our grungy garage.

For want of tripping over the composter daily, the kitchen scraps went into the old fashioned compost bin.

And then one day…we opened it.

NEVER leave your poor Naturemill alone in the dark, half-starved for love and scraps, guzzling electricity on an empty stomach. I didn’t have the stomach to take a photo. Mike had to clean it out. : ) I can’t remember how I managed that coup, but I was mighty grateful.

The upper bin was growing a wispy cobweb of something that wasn’t quite mold. Maybe it was some spectacular hot-house fungi evolving from our damp wet coast soil. It was a bit like something you might see in a movie with ‘invasion’ and ‘horror’ in the IMDB notes. I’ve either forgotten, denied or avoided what was in the lower tray.  Mike is generally forgetful (a merciful quality in someone you spend your life with) but horror show stuff often lodges in his brain. But I don’t think you really want to know.

Then I ordered some compost for the garden.

“Why are you buying compost? Use our compost,” Mike said. Then he saw the size of the the cubic yard of compost (it’s a big mound – but just enough to fill in some beds and top-dress the rest), and he asked, “Why do we even bother? We’ll never make enough compost.”

And really we never will.

Yes, I know that’s not the point, and I’m pretty sure I explained it to Mike at the time. You already know why we must compost. (Yes, you do! Less garbage in landfills, remember?)

But I swear we’ve never had such success in our old black plastic bin as we did this summer. I think the bin was a little jealous of all the attention we lavished on the Naturemill. All that chopping, and adding and checking and button-pushing. All we do with the old bin is open her up and toss stuff in. Now, in November, she’s slowing down again – having a tough time with the Hallowe’en pumpkins. Maybe we need to plug the little one back in for the winter. Play them against each other, as it were.

Yes, so you may have noticed that we haven’t posted in a bit. Hem. Well, things have been pretty busy. Mike’s mom moved in to recover from from bypass surgery, but we did compost, all through that. Heart-smart veggie peelings and such.

But the sad, humbling truth is – the smell won.

So today, instead of obsessing about “what’s that funky odour?” in the kitchen, we comment on the funny smell out by the garage door. The good news is: it’s much easier to open fully in the new location, it’s handy to the garden when it’s time to empty and we now just accept and enjoy it for what it is. Which is a fast way to go from scraps to compost.

Sorry, Naturemill. Those photos of the smiling lady in her chi-chi kitchen bear little resemblance to the expressions of horror witnessed in our kitchen. We do, however, believe that it is probably just us. We know our limitations. That’s why we invest in technology to overcome them. Sigh.

I ran into Al (our local bokashiman – http://www.bokashiman.com/) at our neighbourhood  farmer’s market a week ago (or was it two?). He’s offered me enzymes to see if that will assist in calming the evil odour. When we find out I will post again.

For now, we have a rammed earth wall to build out back. It’s OK. We hired someone who knows what he’s doing to help.

Somehow, someone pushed the transfer button.

Down went the partially composted gunk. Right on top of the long awaited well-cured compost gold.

Blech! It’s overflowing, said the poppa.

Yuck! Empty it, said the momma.

I’ll be outside, said the baby, and she ran through the door holding her nose shut and wouldn’t come back inside until the compost was emptied.

Shall we put it on the veggies? asked the poppa.

Are you mental? asked the momma.

So they dumped it in the raspberry patch, crossed their fingers and went on with their lives.

And it’s still there.

Well as you can see we’ve been about as on top of this blog as we were with our compost. Here’s a quick update.

We transferred the from the main container to the “holding bin” a few weeks ago. We still haven’t moved it anywhere useful (like the garden). The manual says “the longer the better” for resting time which is a recipe for procrastination in my books!

The smell is still there. It has gone through a variety of fragrances and is currently settled on “pungent” or as my daughter puts it: “did you open the composter? I feel nauseaus …”.

We are separating our compost into “OK for the kitchen composter” and “the kitchen composter will choke on this or emit noxious fumes”. We keep an overflowing bucket for the former category and hold our nose to toss in the “kitchen composter” scraps.

I’m sure the fumes could probably be neutralized with more generous helpings of baking soda and hamster pellets. I tossed in some yesterday but I haven’t opened it up since then to see.

mike
:8^}

I was loudly lamenting my eggshell troubles at work yesterday, when a co-worker sat me down and explained how she had handled them, back when she was a keener composter.

She would rinse her eggshells, let them stockpile until a blender-full had piled up, and then pulverize them with water before adding to her compost.

I have a dim and foggy memory of my parents keeping eggshells in a jar of water by the kitchen sink. It seems to me that they soaked them into submission, then crushed them and poured them over the roots of our tomato plants.

They also buried fish heads in the garden rows one year (the year of living dangerously). Our next door neighbour was a fisheries officer (wait, that should be capitalized), a Fisheries Officer. In our small coastal town, illegal salmon buying from the local Natives was rampant. I think the salmon were ‘jigged’ (I really should have paid more attention to my childhood), which means they were caught by hooks, and therefore easily identified by the state of their fish heads.

My parents were out there with hoes, chasing away cats, ensuring that the evidence stayed buried until it could no longer be identified. You’ve never seen such tense gardeners.

The salmon I buy (wild and pacific, excuse me, Pacific) is generally head free and wrapped in plastic. Until the stock runs out from farmed fish lice. Time to get some illegal chickens of my own and ensure future egg supply, I think.

Nothing is perfect.

When we bought the Naturemill electric indoor kitchen composter, I thought the days of outdoor dashes through pelting rain and snow, clutching an overflowing bowl of vegetative goodies were finished. Admittedly, the bowl rarely overflows anymore, but we still have a small bowl that needs to go out to be emptied. It’s filled with citrus peels, excess mango peels (too much mango seems to make an unpleasant smell) and stuff that seems too tough or fibrous. I just checked the bowl and the fridge, and I can’t think of an example of tough and fibrous, but I’m sure to discover one. Soon.

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Some weeks it can be hard to keep up with things. We held an impromptu birthday barbeque last night in our back yard and delighted in the warm summery evening. Several hours into it, I realized that a few of the lawn chairs were located a bit too close to my bags of mushroom manure (still waiting to be spread after four wet, chilly weeks). Even in plastic bags, the fragrance does waft about. Didn’t seem to bother anyone, but those chairs were vacant all evening.

Which makes me wonder about the indoor kitchen composter. Does it still smell? Have we just gotten used to it? I think I need to get away for a few days so I can return, fresh-nosed and figure that out.

We have managed to keep only one compost bowl going. We stopped feeding the electric composter a few days ago (or was it a week?) in anticipation of our first ‘transfer’. That’s fancy talk for pushing a button that lets the composted stuff drop from the mixing tray into the curing tray. The manufacturer’s manual could benefit from some editing by a neophyte composter. (Yes, I did read it all the way through before undertaking this. We keep getting to stages where we know that we read something somewhere, but can’t find it easily when we need to. It makes me rather nervous.)

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I was stunned and delighted after a few days of deadline duty (which means takeout food and a filthy house) to come back to the blog and find….COMMENTS!!!

Holy cow, someone out there knows we exist and they don’t mind that we’re abject failures at composting. There is love in this world! Thank you for letting us know that you read (and dare we hope) care about our compost.

(At this point, Mike called from the other computer, “Are you sure those comments aren’t just spam?”)

Sorry, Rebecca, I haven’t figured out what to do with the cherry pits. I’m still wondering how to rake them up from the back corner. Pesky little things go right between the rake’s tines. I wish it were legal to transport bunny droppings across borders (what good is NAFTA?) but we are in Canada and sadly, bunny-free and can’t take any sawdust. We did just add sticky feet to our cherry tree.

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After a week of fervent nose blowing, my cold has passed and I am no longer mouth breathing. I haven’t worried too much about the kitchen odour in this time, because, well… we haven’t exactly been entertaining.

Last night as I stood next to our electric compost unit something strange assailed my nostrils. Strange enough for me to stop talking and sniff. I smelled bread dough rising. A quick survey revealed that there was no bread (dough or otherwise) that wasn’t sani-sealed in plastic and the bread machine languished, empty and relatively clean.

It was as if the heavenly clouds had parted and shone down on our kitchen composter! It really smells like bread – just like they said in the manual. Not baking bread, mind you, but more like the yeasty rising stage at the start.

I’ll take it over rotting corpses any day.

Well, we hit the one week mark a few days ago. That means the cultures should be established and we can start adding regular compost. We opened it up to observe the well stewed black goo before tossing in our week’s accumulated goodies. I’m still a bit confused about whether we can just keep adding it whenever we want. Doesn’t it need some time to stew without new stuff being added?

The smell is still there (much as I’ve been in denial about it). It comes and goes in intensity and bouquet. It’s been mostly unnoticable but does occasionally spike up, especially when we open the lid to add new compostables. We have added baking soda and hamster pellets like the manual says but I don’t think it’s helping much.

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