Still Throwing Away Food Scraps? This Is Your Sign to Start Composting Now

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If you haven’t started your composting journey, consider this your sign to begin. Turning your kitchen scraps and backyard waste into nutrient-rich plant food is easy, resource-efficient, and helps the environment by reducing the amount of waste going into landfills.

Plus, using organic material as a fertilizer for the plants in your garden (including your tomato vines) will help them grow strong and yield more delicious fruit and veggies.

There are a bunch of myths that make home composting sound daunting. However, breaking down organic material into compost is a natural process that, as long as it’s done right, doesn’t require much attention and, above all, doesn’t stink.

Composting doesn’t require much space either. There are several methods you can choose from, depending on your living situation and the amount of waste you consistently generate. Each of them has its own particularities. Here's everything you need to know to start composting at home and figure out the right method for you.

The Science Behind Composting

In simple words, composting is the natural process by which organic material breaks down into a soil amendment very fittingly known as compost.

Now, let’s break that down.

Organic material is everything that was once alive, and now it’s not. This includes a wide range of things—from leaves and grass clippings in your front yard, to vegetable peels, apple cores, and uncoated paper, to animal carcasses and food leftovers.

Compost is a soil-like, nutrient-rich substance you can use to feed your indoor or outdoor plants. You can put seeds directly into it or use it as fertilizer, depending on the technique you use. For example, the result of vermicomposting (the method that uses worms to break down waste) may be too rich to plant in directly, so you’re better off sprinkling it on the soil.

Organic material becomes compost when you create a system in which elements such as carbon, nitrogen, water, and oxygen are balanced. When all of these ingredients combine in the right proportions, microbes can metabolize waste and break it down, which is just a technical way of saying "they eat everything and poop it out." Then the cycle starts again when larger microbes eat smaller ones, creating a long food chain that results in compost.

However, Jean Bonhotal, director of the Cornell Waste Management Institute in Soil and Crop Sciences, mentions a fifth and crucial element—temperature.

“The microorganisms are really important, an integral part of the whole process, and they give off heat,” she explains. “They're metabolizing and heating that compost up. They just need those little extra bits of carbon to insulate the pile so they don’t freeze in the winter.”

Temperature also determines what the system can break down. Foods like meat and dairy require more heat to degrade properly—above 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Bonhotal explains backyard composting piles rarely reach that temperature because they’re too small.

“It's mass that’s the problem,” she says. “Composting should be able to happen in a three-by-three-by-three foot cube. However, that’s too small for the whole north of the country and continent, because we need insulation to get to those temperatures.”

Municipal composting piles are big enough to manage this type of waste, which is why you should save any animal residues (think chicken bones, oily leftovers, and meat gone bad) for collection day.

What Can You Compost? All You Need to Know About Greens and Browns

A healthy compost pile is made out of two types of waste: greens and browns.

The green feedstock is the kitchen scraps and food waste, but also anything in your backyard that’s still green, including fresh leaves and grass clippings. Technically speaking, greens account for the nitrogen in the equation and also provide a lot of the moisture. This is why you’ll also see this feedstock referred to as "wets," which is also a great way to identify this type of waste when color is not helpful.

Browns, on the other hand, are mostly dry carbon-rich feedstock. This includes dead leaves, twigs, dead yellowish plants, and non-shiny paper and cardboard.

For a composting pile to do its job, greens and browns should be well-balanced in quantities. Bonhotal says the golden ratio is three parts carbon to one part nitrogen—that is, three any-sized containers of dead leaves, for example, to one of veggie peels, coffee grounds, and moldy bread.

Proportions are essential for any kind of composting to work, but that doesn’t mean you have to pull up a scale or anything like that. Measure your feedstock approximately with the same bucket or container, and you should be good to go.

You compost pile won't smell as long as you cover your "greens" with thick layers of "browns."

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How to Choose Your Composting Method

There are several ways to compost depending on the amount of waste you generate, how involved you want to be, how long you want to wait until you get the final product, and, most importantly, how much space you have available.

We’ll go over the four most popular methods so you can pick the best one for you.

Vermicomposting: A pet and a composting pile all rolled into one

Vermicomposting doesn’t rely solely on microbes, as it uses worms to convert waste into a soil amendment. There are several ways to go about it, from buying a stackable bed to making your own and even repurposing an old drawer.

In this method, microbes do their thing while worms eat the microorganisms and turn the waste into poop. The result is a nutrient-rich compost that might be a bit too strong to use as a planting medium, but it’s perfect as a fertilizer.

According to Bonhotal, this is the perfect method for city dwellers with little available space. However, as mold and mildew are part of the process, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln guide on vermicomposting recommends setting up your bin outside or far from the living areas if you’re sensitive or allergic.

Bokashi composting: Excellent for small spaces

Bokashi is not so much a composting method as it is a pre-composting method. The technique uses an airtight container and a special inoculant to ferment food scraps anaerobically—that is, without air.

After about two weeks, this process results in a nutrient-rich tea and a substance that needs to be buried or added to a conventional composting pile for further breakdown.

There are two significant benefits to Bokashi composting. First, that any kitchen scraps are fair game as feedstock, including meat and oily foods. Second, Bokashi bins are usually small, so this method is a great indoor composting alternative if you don’t have a backyard or only have limited space.

Of course, the big downside is that Bokashi composting doesn’t complete the job if plant food is what you’re interested in. However, it’s still a great way to reduce waste and collaborate with communal composting if you have access to a pile.

Backyard composting (hot and cold versions): The classics

When we talk about backyard composting, we generally refer to a three-cubic-foot space where you’ll pile up waste. How you contain that waste is entirely up to you: you can buy a bin, repurpose a garbage can, or build your own with cinder blocks, wood, or chicken wire.

If you’re going the DIY route, just make sure your pile has proper ventilation.

Keep in mind that your pile’s core temperature (and by extension, the speed at which feedstock is broken down) is directly proportional to its size, so smaller bins may still work, but might be slower to render finished compost. This is especially true if you choose not to turn your pile—more on that later.

Hot and cold composting piles look very much alike, with the only difference being that a hot pile is filled to the brim from the get-go, while the cold pile gets feedstock as it’s available. Hot composting is great if you keep a garden or orchard, as you’ll generate plenty of greens and browns to easily fill up an entire pile.

Because of its initial volume, a hot composting pile reaches a high temperature faster, allowing waste to break down more quickly. Depending on the size of your pile, where you are in the country, and the time of year, you can get fresh compost as soon as four months, whereas a cold pile can take between 10 and 18 months.

On the flip side, hot composting requires you to turn your pile regularly to reintroduce oxygen and prevent it from becoming so hot that microbes won’t survive. This may not be a problem, but you might want to think twice before using this method if you suffer from back pain or have difficulty lifting heavy weights.

Cold composting, on the other hand, doesn’t require you to do anything other than put your greens into the pile and cover them thoroughly with your browns. This is Bonhotal’s preferred method, and what she calls “the lazy man’s way to do it.”

Cold Composting for Beginners

If you have the space, learning how to cold compost is the best method to start your journey. Decide what type of container you’ll use and then choose the perfect place for it.

Find a location for your composting pile

There’s one maxim you should follow when picking the right location for your cold composting pile: provide a balanced environment.

And before you start thinking about factors like light and humidity, start with the literal meaning of balance by choosing some even ground. Your pile will start growing before you know it, and you don’t want it to topple over and mess up your feedstock layers.

Additionally, Bonhotal recommends you consider some space beside your pile to store some browns.

“Rake some leaves, put them in some bags, and leave them next to your compost bin so that you can have them each time,” she says.

Now you can think about humidity. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) recommends avoiding placing your compost pile under eaves or in areas with poor drainage. Your waste heap will surely need plenty of moisture to work, but you want to have some control over how much water goes into the system. You don’t want rain to turn your soon-to-be compost into a soggy mess.

When it comes to light, choose somewhere that gets partial shade. Too much light could raise the temperature of your composting pile to a point that either forces you to turn it constantly or makes it unlivable for your microbes.

How to build a composting pile the right way

Once you find the perfect spot, start your composting pile by placing a thick bed of carbon-rich browns at the bottom. Sticks will provide a solid foundation and plenty of ventilation.

Next, prepare your greens by breaking them down as much as you can: chop big watermelon rinds, cut long peels into smaller pieces, and shred that head of lettuce you bought only so it could rot in the back of your fridge. Think of it like chewing your food properly before swallowing—the more you break it down, the easier it’ll be to digest.

Continue by layering your greens and placing them in a small crater or bowl in the middle of your browns. Make sure to thoroughly cover everything up, keeping the 3-to-1 greens-to-browns ratio in mind. This is what the Waste Management Institute at Cornell University calls the lasagna method, and it might be the single most important thing to remember when cold composting.

“Never should any food be on the outside,” Bonhotal states. “Nothing recognizable should be on the outside—it should be in that bowl in the middle of the pile.”

Properly covering your greens with enough browns will keep away pests, pets, and most importantly, foul smells.

When you’re done covering your greens, Bonhotal recommends finishing up by adding some water. She explains that people tend to use more browns than greens, and some of the browns we add to our piles may need a little help before they become microbial food.

While most of the nitrogen in greens is ready to be digested, some compounds in browns might prevent carbon from being readily available. For example, newspaper breaks down more slowly than other papers because the cellulose fibers in it are covered in lignin, a natural complex polymer that’s highly resistant to degradation.

This essentially means your feedstocks are decomposing at different rates, so even if you’re adding the right amount of browns, you’re not actually adding as much carbon as you think.

This is where water comes in.

“Everything has carbon and nitrogen in it. We just have to make it available. And if it's not wet enough, then it won't be available,” Bonhotal says.

Troubleshooting Your Composting Pile

You might have avoided composting because of these common problems. Fear not—there are easy ways to solve them all.

How to fix bad odors in your composting pile

We’ll let Bonhotal take this one: “If you're getting fruit flies or odors or things like that, you're not covering it.”

Simple as that.

The expert is adamant about the importance of putting your greens to bed under a thick layer of browns. When lasagna-ing your feedstock, also remember to make a small bowl on the top layer to place your food scraps in. That way, they’ll be fully encased in browns.

How to keep pests (and pets) away from your composting pile

Conveniently enough, keeping your pile from smelling will also keep nosy snoopers—including your dog—from burrowing into your compost heap.

Thorough coverage has the added benefit of insulating the composting pile's core, helping it reach and maintain a proper temperature.

“As soon as you have temperature in your compost, then the animals generally will not dig into it—including your house pets,” says Bonhotal. “They're more likely to get in there than wild animals are, often times.”

My compost is not breaking down. What do I do?

Would you believe it if we told you that the culprit is most likely poor coverage? This is certainly not the only answer, but it’s the most common one.

Depending on where you are in the country, the temperature in your composting pile might depend more than you know on that brown insulation. Make sure you’re adding enough carbon-rich materials and water to jumpstart the process.

A possible, albeit more uncommon, answer to this problem may be that your compost pile is not heating up because the microbial environment is too competitive. There might be several reasons for this, but you can start by ensuring you’re adding the correct greens-to-browns ratio.

You can also try shaking things up by adding a wider range of greens into the mix. For example, if you’re relying solely on the greens you get from gardening, you might want to add more food scraps, or if you’re only adding veggie peels, try diversifying the microbes’ menu by feeding them coffee grounds and leftover rice.

Lastly, you can also experiment with introducing more microorganisms into your pile. You can achieve this by adding moldy fruits. And yes, mold and fungus are totally ok going into a compost pile.

“It's the more the merrier here. They're doing their jobs, same with fungi, same with everything else,” says Bonhotal.

How to Know When Your Compost Is Ready and How to Use It

Cold composting can render results in 10 to 18 months. There’s a long time between the ends of that range, so let’s break it down.

Exactly how long it’ll take will mostly depend on your pile’s core temperature, which, in turn, will depend on the weather where you live, whether you turned your pile and how often, and if your system was well-balanced. The maxim here is the higher the temperature, the faster you’ll get your compost.

Bonhotal explains that the best way to tell is to check the texture: you should look for a soil-like substance. This doesn’t mean that your compost should be completely homogenous, as there might be a stick here and there that you’ll need to sift out. However, if it feels like you could put it in a planter, you should be good to go.

Another way to tell if your compost is ready is to check the bottom of your pile and see if it’s coming out. You’ll be adding your feedstock to the top of the pile throughout the entire process, but the final result will always come from the bottom, as that’s the material that’s been in the pile the longest.

Once you have your compost, you can start growing stuff. If you’re using chicken wire to contain your pile, Bonhotal recommends planting anything with vines directly into it—squash, pumpkins, tomatoes, cucumbers, etc.

You can also shovel it directly onto the ground or sift it to produce a finer material. The latter can be helpful if you’re planning on using your compost in smaller planters.

Home Composting FAQs

Can I compost meat or dairy?

Generally, no, as home composting piles are not big enough to reach the temperature required to break down oily foods like moldy cheese or meat leftovers.

When it comes to home composting, the only exception to this rule is Bokashi composting.

If you need to compost meat and dairy but don’t have a Bokashi bucket, sending your waste to a municipal composting program is your best bet. However, make sure to read the instructions carefully before you accumulate waste.

Is composting safe for pets?

According to the ASPCA, decomposing organic material can result in the formation of mycotoxins that may cause tremors, seizures, vomiting, and/or diarrhea when ingested by your pets.

If at all possible, keep your composting pile out of your pets’ reach. You can also make your pile less attractive by covering food waste with a thick layer of brown feedstock. This will prevent odors from getting out and help the composting process.

What if I don’t have outdoor space?

There are several composting options for people living in small apartments with no outdoor space, including vermicomposting and Bokashi composting.

Mold and mildew might be a problem with vermicomposting if you’re allergic or sensitive. If so, keeping your container as far from living areas as possible should help.

And don’t forget communal composting. If you live in a building with outdoor space, you can start a composting pile that you and your neighbors can benefit from. Community centers and gardens also often offer composting spaces. Reach out to your community and see if there’s a pile you can add your waste to.