We live in a townhouse with patios but no yard. We have a garden of sorts, but all the plants are in pots. A few years ago I tried to compost. Space is an issue as we don’t have a large yard to keep a compost pile going. I tried a bucket approach, but either due to my ineptitude or laziness it never really worked. 

Composting caught my eye again this month in an article in Cooking Light. They showed a variety of new approaches even for small spaces. Initially, I was drawn to the NatureMill kitchen composter which is about the size of a paper shredder. It uses a small amount of electricity to heat and rotate your kitchen scraps to create compost out of food you would normally throw away. 

According to the EPA: 

Yard trimmings and food residuals together constitute 24 percent of the U.S. municipal solid waste stream. That’s a lot of waste to send to landfills when it could become useful and environmentally beneficial compost instead!

Dave was wary of using a plug in device and wondered about how “green” this type of approach would be. Further research brought me to another outdoor solution that would fit into our space, yet also allow us to compost yard waste, paper and even vacuum dust. With 3 cats we have a lot of vacuum dust. 

Earthmaker Composter

Costco.com is selling an innovative composter from New Zealand called the Earthmaker Aerobic Composter that uses gravity to keep the composting active. It has three chambers for the different stages of decomposition: mixing, digesting and maturing. Basically, you throw your kitchen scraps and yard waste in the top chamber. After about 30 days you  remove the divider that lets the waste drop to the middle chamber where it continues to decompose. You can continue to add waste to the top chamber. After 30 more days you push the compost from the middle chamber down to the bottom chamber where you now have compost. It may be ideal for a lazy gardener like myself. 

I ordered it on the Costco website and hope that it meets our needs. I would love to be able to turn our organic rubbish into something useful and help the planet at the same time.