Organic Matter. It Matters.
Maybe you drive an electric car. Compost your table scraps. Maybe you pick up other people’s trash when you spend the day lakeside or take a hike in the White Tank Mountains. Maybe you use only organic fertilizers on your lawn. Maybe you put out water feeders for the pollinators or use only reusable grocery bags when you go to the store.
I have recently noticed a couple of restaurants that we frequent, using compostable boxes for their takeout items and it made me smile to think about the little things we do to make this planet function just a little bit longer. If each one of us does something to make the world a better place it may make all the difference. And it feels good! Am I right? It may take 5 minutes of your day to pick up a bag of trash or cost a bit more to buy compostable k-cups for your coffee pot but it’s the small choices we make that change the world.
If you’re still reading this, you are probably more conscious than most about how you can play a role in improving our planet. The more I learn about mimicking nature, regenerative farming, and the impact small farms have on the world, the more pride I find in what I am doing every day.
When we started composting, we read an article about the adverse side effects of food scraps in landfills, it blew my mind to think that putting my banana peels in a trash bag that ends up buried under the ground would produce gasses that increase the deterioration of our planet. If you Google, what is the impact of compostable materials in landfills, The first thing that comes up is an article from the Environmental Protection Agency or EPA that talks about the methane gasses that come from landfills due to compostable materials breaking down inside of trash bags under the ground. This feels like something we should be learning about in school but I’m not going to go off on a tangent right now.
If this information is out in the world, how come we don’t find better ways to separate and process our food waste? Well don’t feel guilty. The truth is I was well into my 30’s when I came across this information. We had just begun to explore the idea of building our own compost to give our plants all the nutrients they need to be strong and healthy. It started with a load of wood chips a landscape company donated to us and a bin full of lettuce cores, eggshells, coffee grounds etc. There is a whole list of items you can compost. For example, any of your vegetable waste, the potato peels, the apple cores, corn cobs or onion peels, even the molding fruits or vegetables you find at the bottom of the bin when you clean out the fridge. Then, the eggshells and coffee grounds, you would normally throw in the trash can go right in the same bucket. You can even put shrimp shells or crab shells in after your friends come over for a seafood feast on your patio.
I’ll be honest, it took me a little while to learn what I could toss in our compost bucket, but Google was a real help. Sometimes, in the beginning, I’d find myself turning back around to pull something out of the trash. At first, I thought, “How much food waste could our household really produce?” “Could it even make a difference?” But it amazed me how much food scraps one household had to offer our compost pile and it felt good to see it going back into the earth instead of the landfill. But we have a farm that is constantly in need of organic matter to feed our thriving plants. So… I began to ask our friends and neighbors, I even found myself talking to the owner of a local restaurant who was happy to offer us all the broccoli ends, eggshells and onion peels he had previously been throwing in a dumpster. And then writing this blog post, So I am asking you to find a local farm, find out if you can drop your food scraps off to them, or start your own compost pile to feed your herb garden. Or drop it off here at our farm. If you’re close by we might be able to pick it up.
Either way, keep doing what you’re doing because it matters. Every reusable grocery bag we bring to the grocery store, every piece of trash we pick up in a parking lot or along a hiking trail, every bucket of organic waste we keep out a landfill… It matters.
Our compost bucket
Our working Compost Pile
Our finished compost pile
