The Lazy Girl's Guide to Composting

I truly want to reduce my waste for the sake of the planet. I researched composting... and researched... and researched. You are supposed to have an equal mix of green matter (your table scraps, veggies gone bad, etc.) and brown matter (dead leaves, newspaper...). Most people do this by having two bins: a compost bin and one to just hold brown matter. When they throw in their scraps, they add in an equal amount of brown matter. This is actually the RIGHT way to compost, and the best way to get rich fertilizer for your garden relatively quickly.

Yes, those are Sun Chips bags.

I, however, only had one bin and I was not about to go out and buy a new one. So this is my compost pile. Really I just chunk in anything that is supposed to be composted, but in no particular order or balance. I'm not real good about chopping things up into small pieces like I'm supposed to, either. You can see the newspaper on the right; it's really supposed to be shredded.

I have a terrible unbalance toward green matter, but in the spring when the pecan fuzzies fall (those of you with pecans know EXACTLY what I'm talking about), I'll add them in as brown matter and everything will balance out. Doing things this way is not going to make super fast compost to amend my garden with, but eventually it will all decompose and stay out of the landfill.

So now no one has an excuse for not composting. It's not any harder than taking out the trash!