How To Make FREE & Easy Compost With Kitchen Scraps!
We all know organic compost is your plant’s best friend. By composting your kitchen scraps, you can create nutrient-rich soil. By doing so it will help your plants thrive and reduce the amount of kitchen waste ending up in landfills. Happy plants and reducing the amount of harmful gases such as methane into the atmosphere, that’s a win win situation! Unfortunately not everyone has the space or resource to create natural fertilser using a compost bin or a compost pile.
Thankfully there is a quick and easy way to make natural fertiliser using your food scraps for immediate use! The method is called trench composting. I’ll show you step by step how you can do this to nourish your soil and tremendously boost plant growth.
I could have a small compost pile or compost bin, but I don’t like the sight and smell of them. Since my garden is small, I use the trench composting method. This way I still gain the benefits of the homemade, natural fertiliser without having a compost bin or pile. I also love the fact this composting method also reduces and reuses kitchen waste, which is beneficial to our environment as it’s sustainable and saves me a lot of money at the same time!
See how I started My eco journey & how going eco has saved me money.
What is trench composting?
Every time you throw vegetable or fruit peels into your little kitchen waste bin, you probably wonder why you can’t just burry the kitchen waste in your garden. But you actually can! This is called trench composting, where by gardeners bury almost any food scraps directly into soil in their garden or in potted plants in and around their home. The kitchen scraps will then compost underground and benefitting both the environment by reducing waste and the garden by adding nutrients to the soil. Food scraps are full of vitamins and minerals. Why buy expensive fertilzers, when you can make your own for free, right?
If you are looking for a way to achieve a thrifty, eco-friendly and sustainable lifestyle, kitchen waste composting using this method can bring your step closer to your goal.
What are the benefits of trench composting?
Trench composting has many benefits, including:
- It’s FREE!
- Reduces landfill waste hence sustainable & zero waste.
- Super quick & easy to do.
- Produces nutrient rich soil.
- Helps retain moisture in the soil.
- No need to use space up like compost bins or compost piles.
- No odours.
- Promotes plant growth.
How to trench compost effectively?
Now that you’ve discovered that there is a quick and easy way to make compost from kitchen waste, it’s time for you to create some. Trench composting using kitchen scraps may sound complicated, but it’s actually super easy. Here I show you how you step by step how I make compost.
1. Collect Kitchen Scraps
First gather some kitchen scraps such as vegetable & fruit peelings. For a full list of what can and can’t be composted, have a look at the end of this article.
2. Cut The Kitchen Waste
Cut your kitchen scraps into smaller pieces using scissors or a blender if you have one. I usually use my KitchenAid Mini Food Chopper.
This will speed up the composting process, as the scraps are broken down into tiny bits, which makes it easier for the soil to break down and absorb the nutrients from the kitchen scraps.
3. The Smaller The Better
The smaller you cut the kitchen scraps, the easier and quicker it is for the soil to break it down. I tend to blend he veg skin until it looks like in the picture.
Now it’s ready to be used in the garden.
4. Dig a hole
Dig a hole into the soil and burry the mixture into the soil. That’s it. Wasn’t that super easy?
Now bacteria will slowly decompose the mixture. To speed it up a bit more, you can add earthworms.
I tend to a dig a few small holes between my plants in the garden and burry 2-3 heaps of the home made compost in the soil.
What you can and can’t use to make compost
We create kitchen waste on a daily basis and have so much of it. Most kitchen scraps are compostable and biodegradable, meaning they are ideal for garden use and boosting plant growth. However not everything is beneficial to our plants. As it can be tricky to know what is and isn’t compostable, I’ve created a do and don’t compostable list:
Do compost these:
- Herbs and spices
- Fruit & Vegetable peelings
- Old fruit and veg
- Bread
- Cereal
- Wheat crumbs
- Coffee grounds
- Egg cartons
- Teabags
- Tea leaves
- Nut shells
- Wine corks
- Eggshells
- Grains
Don’t compost these:
- Meat
- Bones
- Fat and grease
- Coal ash
- Diseased and toxic plants
- Milk
- Cheese
- Yogurt
- Cooking oil
- Fish
