Greening up our Trash

Now that we have our own house with a yard and we aren't planning to move anytime too soon we decided that we would like to try out composting. This is a great way to lower the amount of waste your household produces because lots of things can be composted depending upon which type of compost bin you have. We haven't yet started a worm bin so we can't put dairy and meat into our compost bin, but all of our fruit and vegetable scraps are able to be composted. We can also compost a lot of our yard trash, though currently the majority of our yard trash goes into a yard waste bin that the city composts. The reason that most of our yard trash ends up in the bin is simply because we are still getting our yard in order which has involved a lot of major trimming of some of the trees and bushes. This results in a lot of yard trash. Of course trimming back some of the trees and bushes has been really important to the health of them so that we can remove diseased branches and clear enough of the limbs so that the sun can get through to the leaves on the inside of the tree which were dying.

One way to make composting a little easier for us was to get a small crock for our kitchen counter that we could put scraps in while we are cooking. This prevents us from having to constantly run outside to the compost bin and also allows us to leave the scraps for several days before we bring them outside to add to the bin in the yard. This was especially great when we had several days of rain and didn't really want to run out to the compost bin in the yard. It's also nice when it is really cold out or really dark out or we just don't feel like running our scraps outside.