Documenting my attempts to live more sustainably

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I recently noticed I’ve been putting pressure on myself to live sustainably “the right way.” After all, I thought, if I’m going to write about living sustainably on a blog or talk about it with friends and family, I had better be an expert on it. This added pressure and led me to procrastination, until one night I finally willed myself to research composting. Within minutes I was reassured that I had picked the perfect place to start towards a more sustainable life.

Why? Because composting still works even if you don’t do a damn thing. If you simply threw all of your food and yard scraps into a big pile in the middle of your yard, and just let that pile sit there…the pile would eventually decompose on it’s own. We literally can’t fail at composting. And you get to save waste from going to the dump and you’ll soon have nice compost to help your garden or plants!

Our goal instead is simply to speed up the process. A compost pile can be ready in about 4 to 6 months

So one day I found a bunch of rotting fruit in our fridge and decided that it was a great day to start my compost bin!

Two articles that I found helpful, and if you’re looking to start composting I recommend taking a look:

1. https://www.leduc.ca/composting/7-easy-steps-composting – a clear walkthrough of the steps
2. https://www.sodgod.com/composting/ – has many more visuals and also gets into more about the benefits of composting

In particular I loved this visual from the second article:

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So with a little research under my belt and that visual as my guide, I got to work! Setting up my compost bin took about thirty minutes. Here were my steps:

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Two weeks later and things are going okay. I layer on greens and browns every few days (from the yard, or from food scraps we keep in the freezer). There were quite a bit of flies at first but that has tapered down; after reading this blog post I’m not too worried about it. The compost actually smells nice, earthy and citrusy, and it’s great to have a place to throw yard waste.

Here’s the compost bin after two weeks. The two plastic bags have cut up palm leaves and soil to make layering the browns easier.

That said, I’ve seen some areas for improvement:

• My compost pile is very dry – I mean, look at that picture above! The container was getting quite a lot of direct sunlight and it’s been very hot and dry here lately in Puerto Rico.
• The sticks/leaves (browns) I’m adding could be smaller – Smaller things will compost faster. Remember our goal is to speed up the process, so taking some time to break these into smaller pieces can pay off in the long run.
• I’m not really paying attention to the ratio of browns and greens– it seems that 2:1 browns to green is ideal, but I’ve just been dumping stuff in there.
• My container is too small – It’s only been two weeks and my container is halfway full!

I’ll make some adjustments based on the above and report back in a few weeks to share how things are going!