The kitchen composter is still working like a champ. The anaerobic bacteria are reproducing to their hearts content and turning paper scraps, veggie waste, and other kitchen scraps into potting soil. I noticed that the outside of the composter was a few degrees warmer than the wall it sits against, but that could be because I’ve been running the heater in my apartment and it sits near a vent. On the other hand, it’s nice to think that the composter is adding a little bit of heat to my home and reducing my heating bill by a few cents.

What’s in my composter? (new items are marked in bold):
Some paper napkins
3 pumpkins worth of pumpkin goo
A pint of cherries
2 pear pits
About 1/4 of the bag of Bokashi
2 Corn cobs
The rinds of 5 oranges
3 Grapefruit husks
About 3 cups of vegetable scraps
A cup of soy bean husks
Scrap paper from direct mail
About 2 dozen tea bags
8 Corn husks from Christmas tamales (hey - I live in Texas!)
More paper napkins
The skin of a miniature pumpkin
Half of a bagel

The composter is now about 2/3 full. The upper layers continue to settle, but I would guess that the bottom layers are about as compact as they’re going to get.

When I added tamale husks this week, I broke one of the cardinal rules of open air composting - I added compost that includes animal products (pork and chicken grease). This is something I’ve been leery about doing with the Kitchen Composter, even though the manual suggests I could compost any kind of protein that I want to (from beef trimmings all the way up to noisy neighbors). I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this doesn’t derail the composting experiment but we wont know until we try.

Composter output:
About 1/4 cup of compost tea
No unpleasant smells.

Did you miss the start of this crazy experiment?
Previous Week…
Previous Week…

Where to buy it:
Indoor Kitchen Composter, Click here!
$69.99, including the bin and extra bokashi.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 5:15 am and is filed under Gardening Products, Products We're Using. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.