Lets all give back to Gaia!!!! It's time to have a compost awakening!!

[Kimmie]

YOU DON'T NEED TO LIVE ON A FARM TO COMPOST-

At the time of this posting there are 985 readers on this website. There are 360 members and 625 guests who are all on here learning about what's going on, hoping to find solutions, and some are here to help. So let me ask you..How much food scraps do you think we collectivly (these 985 viewers) will toss into our kitchen trash cans within the next 24 hours that we could give back to Gaia (or Mother Earth)?

Unofficially I can tell you it is about 985 pounds. Now let's add to that our families, neighbors...well heck lets just say ...the other 6 billion+ people on this earth and that will give us about :
6 BILLION POUNDS OF COMPOST/FERTILIZER/HOME-MADE DIRT-in every day!!
All of this should be going right back into the ground as usable soil instead of as part of the mounting land fills-don't you agree?


Let me share with you a personal story and then lets delve deeper into this natural resource so many of us are wasting!!

[SIZE="3"]While in my early teens(1960's) my mother owned an Interior Design Business. After school each day I would walk over to her shop to help make drapes and arrive just as the seamstresses were taking their afternoon break. Momma would greet me, then ask me to take out the coffee grounds, from the fresh pot the ladies had just made.

Mom was very fussy about food smells lingering in the air. "It will permeate the fabrics, and I won't have that in my shop", she would say. So being a dutiful daughter, I would walk the coffee grounds to the back door, step outside and scatter them at the base of the hedge plants that lined the back of the building. [FONT="Book Antiqua"] I didn't think much of it until one day I had to go to the next block over for an appointment and had a look at our building from the view of a block away. The hedges behind the other five shops in the building were barely two foot tall and displayed an occasional flower while ours were over four feet tall and laiden with gorgeous flowers.

This memory set dorment in my mind until ten years later as a young mother I worked in the garden with my mother-in-law. She taught me all about the value of composting kitchen scraps and I have continued the habit all my adult life-even when I didn't have a vegetable garden to toss them in.[/FONT
[SIZE

Now back to our current reality.

Each morning at 5am my husband leaves the house for work with a small lunchbag of hot homebaked Chocolate Chip cookies. We buy the dough in 2lb tubs, that I save to fill with kitchen compost scraps. These tubs get stacked out on a work table to be added into the ground when I have the time.
I dig a hole outside, toss the contents, then cover with the soil I dug out of the hole. Then I hose off the tubs to be used again. I fill the kitchen garbage can with water, add bleach and soak the tubs, after the trash gets taken out to get rid of the smell in the tubs.

You can use any kind of a container to hold the scraps. I know one lady that puts it in a plastic bag in her freezer until she has about a gallons worth-then she takes it out to bury.

WHAT IS ACCEPTABLE FOR COMPOST?
Any fruit /vegi scraps
Coffee grounds/tea bags
Egg shells

No Meat

You will be suprised how quickly it will add up, and how it will enrich your outdoor plants.

You can also bury shredded paper and newspaper.

I know there are fancy composting machines, and you can make a compost bin out of chicken wire, if you don't have to worry about offending neighbors. The bins will smell.

Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock were on the Oprah show a few months back showing how they both work with composting. One of the girls was even going as far as to raise earth worms. They will "eat' through the compost and turn it to soil in record time.

Those of you that live in cities can find a local garden shop and ask who you could donate compost to! You've got to go through a little effort to establish the habit, yet before you know it you will see someone else throwing away a lush banana peel and shake your head at them!!

I know my methods are simple, and my facts vague, yet it feel this is a topic worth digging into. I am asking other composters to post suggestions and help me educate everyone to methods of doing their share to Give back to Gaia