The Composting Diaries

So, after lusting after the Nature Mill Automatic Composter for about a year, my darling Kevin surprised me with our very own for Christmas!

I've never composted before, automatic or manual, so I am super excited to get going! I'll be posting my progress until I have my very own handful of "homemade" soil.

Week 1

To get the composter up and running properly, it needs a week of uninterrupted churning and warming to activate the cultures. The problem is, we aren't sure if the 2 cups of soil we added have live cultures. The instructions call for 2 cups of natural top soil, not packaged soil. Well where does one get this in Brooklyn? We snuck down to the 3 feet by 3 feet plot that houses a tree in front of our apartment and scooped up what we hope is natural soil that has live cultures in it. There's no way of knowing since we have no clue where that soil came from. We're taking the gamble on this one.

We collected food scraps (including a few old potatoes, some leftover ground beef, a nub of passed mozzarella, vegetable peels, garlic & onion skins and 2 old pieces of bread) and finally some dried leaves. We added the obligatory pellets of sawdust and backing powder (for balance) and shut it for the week! We'll have to wait an entire week to find out if our soil had cultures or not. If the answer is no mind you, we will be opening a container of extremely warm, rotting food. So you can imagine my fear.

The composter woke both Kevin and I up during the night churning away, it's supposed to quiet down after a few weeks of breaking in, here's hoping.

More to come next week as we unveil our first batch

(Image: naturemill.com)