Those of you following the blog since last year will know that I created a small home composting system.  This consisted very simply of putting a plastic pot inside a large planter and covering it with a double lid.  Today, I went to see what it was looking like. Here it is, some compost made from kitchen waste six months ago without any additional help-

As the stuff gets composted, it gets compacted and goes down and so I added some more fresh peelings and kitchen waste into it today.  I will also be using some accelerator to see if that helps to speed up the composting.  As the weather has been so wet, this is not ideal but at least it seems to be working.  Inside my kitchen, I have made a four part sorting system- one bin for composting, one bag for cooked food waste, one for dry rubbish and a big bag for recyclables.  I tried using a normal sized rubbish bin and realised that it was taking weeks to fill up with the result that the cooked food waste thrown in was getting mouldy.  I also have very little cooked food waste which is not compostable in the above manner and so this four part sorting means that I can use my peelings and tea and coffee grinds for compost, crushed egg shells for staving off slugs and also for sprinkling on the pots.  The small rubbish is kept in crisp packets or similar size bags that I was going to throw away anyway.  This way my kitchen also doesn’t have any mouldy stuff while I save on buying bin bags!  Of course, this kind of system will only work if you have small bits of non compostable rubbish and don’t eat lots of meat, etc.  Here are my carrot tops growing in my home made compost.