How We Compost Our Kitchen Waste Every Day

As promised in my previous post, I'm back with Part 2 of our mini garden series and what we do behind-the-scenes to sustain it. This time around, I'll be sharing about the wonders of composting kitchen waste, how we do it at home and just how big of an impact the end product of "home-made" compost make our plants extra happy as compared to commercial compost.

First, Why Should Composting Be Important to Us?

Composting food waste from your very own kitchen is one of the best methods for producing FREE, easy-to-make supplement for your garden. It stimulates plant growth and recovers soil vitality. 

This technique is also great for reducing our weekly household waste production. Since we've been cooking a lot more home-cooked meals during MCO, we also noticed that we're producing an increase of kitchen waste and scraps. 

I did some quick reading and it turns out that according to data by the Solid Waste Management and Public Cleansing Corporation (SWCorp), almost 55% of our waste in Malaysian landfills are made out of food alone. That's a lot. If we were to bag all these precious waste in rubbish bins without first segregating them to a recyclable pile, they'd end up in in our landfill and their benefits as organic waste for our garden would be gone forever. 

Through composting and repurposing, we have managed to reduce over half of our overall household waste. For our family at least, we see composting kitchen waste as one of the ways we can do to better take care of our environment. Not to forget, it saves our money from buying compost when we produce "compost-worthy" materials of our own every day.

Is Composting Kitchen Waste Complicated? How Do We Do It?

No, it's actually a very easy and straightforward process. There are various ways to composting, although I'm not sure which one is our household particularly following. 

For the time being, we keep a moderately sized plastic bowl on our kitchen countertop, near a small bin by the sink that is designated for "wet food waste". It's within reach for anyone in our household to throw food scraps and allows us to pile up enough materials before chucking them out to our outdoor compost heap in the garden. 

For our compost, we include scraps from:

• Fruit and vegetables scraps
• Shredded paper and cardboard - food grade packaging
• Eggshells
• Stems and yellowed ulams we harvested
• Tea bags
• Expired bread

What Do We NOT Decompose?

Despite the fact that most kitchen waste can be composted, we still sort out the "good" and "bad" waste. Mostly, this is because we don't want our compost to attract pests or animals in the garden later.

We avoid the following materials when we are composting kitchen waste:

• Meat, fish and bone products
• Oils and grease
• Infected plants/vegetables/fruits
• Pet waste
• Cooked food, excluding boiled veggies and rice

Recently, we are attempting to recycle our cooking oils by sending them to our residential recycling facility in return for small cash. You might want to check out if your neigbourhood or the area you live has similar incentives. 

How Long Does It Take To Make Compost From Kitchen Waste?

We collect recyclable food materials and scraps daily before we turn in the waste to our compost bin outside. Here, we'll mix the kitchen waste with the rest of our garden waste such as dried leaves, weeds and grass clippings among many others. 

To speed up the composting process, we add in a mixture of EM (Effective Microbes) and filtered water to the compost heap. EM helps in producing better quality compost by helping microorganisms to break down the organic materials (our compost scraps) more effectively and most importantly, it filters out the odour from composting! 

Worms also love this stuff and their numbers can multiply considerably to help with composting our kitchen waste. You can easily purchase EM online.

Just to add the cherry on top, we also add normal soil over the entire compost heap to speed up the process. 

Decomposition can take several weeks for organic waste to become compost soil. Here are bags and pots of our successful compost product. Can you see all the happy worms squiggling around in the soil? They'll make our plants very happy once we add some of this compost.

 

Helpful Articles About Composting At Home!

1. Love Food Hate Waste: The many benefits of composting - The Star

If you live in an apartment, condo, or a house that doesn't have a garden patch, composting your kitchen waste is still very doable. As this article says, all you need is a special allocated space to put your compost box or storage.

Image by Joke vander Leij from Pixabay 

2. How to Make a Compost Pile in a Small Apartment - Forbes

A step-by-step instruction on prepping your compost bin!

3. 11 Places in Kuala Lumpur to Drop Off  Your Compost - Zero Waste Malaysia

If you don't have the time or space to create your own compost, you can simply drop your kitchen waste and recyclable items to these spots where they will do it for you!

4. 5 effective homemade fertilisers for your garden - The Star

I forgot to mention this before but since we are avid rice eaters, we also use excess water from washing uncooked rice to water our plants. They LOVE this.

Image by JIb_Enjoy from Pixabay