Benefits of Kitchen Compost Bins
Posted by Barrels and Bins on 1/28/2011
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Composting
Benefits of Kitchen Compost Bins
I love my kitchen for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I love the smell of real home cooking. Whether I’m baking a cake, making a stew or creating a sauce, it always reminds me of childhood and visits to my grandmothers house, where cooking and baking were daily activities. The fragrance of baking bread, the aroma of home grown herbs and the perfume of garden flowers are all mixed up in my head,all linked to warmth, comfort and security. And that’s really the reason I love kitchen compost bins. Sounds odd? Bare with me.
Long before recycling was the politically correct thing to do, my Nana was very careful to store her tea bags, her peelings and her left overs. In fact the only time I can remember her being annoyed with me was once when I threw away the potato peelings and received a stern telling off. She took me outside to see her prized roses and gladioli and told me I’d deprived them of food; that the herbs, flowers and vegetables she grew needed all the goodness they could get!
So when I had a home of my own, I always did the same. My first garden was a few pots on a sunlit balcony, but I grew herbs and jewel colored nasturtiums; bright flowers which also make great salad. They all benefited from the small amount of compost my single woman’s kitchen could provide, but when I got my first real garden, a husband and children of my own, I also got my kitchen compost bin.
It’s great to be able to dispose of all my food waste, confident in the knowledge it will convert to nutritious compost, and because my bin uses Bokashi to create the compost it takes everything, including bread, fish and meat so I can happily let my kids clean up because I don’t have to worry about them feeding the wrong thing to the garbage disposal unit; virtually everything goes in the kitchen compost bin where it ferments and turns into safe, nutritious compost. As the bin is air tight, sweet smelling flowers are still the most powerful fragrance in my kitchen.
Bokashi is a mix of effective micro-organisms created from wheat bran. These break down the kitchen waste and produce compost a lot faster than my grandmother’s method, which was basically to have a large heap in the garden which took almost a whole year to rot. The result is a great fertilizer; I can return my kitchen waste to the soil and see the results in my garden.
I still grow nasturtiums in pots, but my garden is filled vegetables, tomatoes, fragrant lilies and my great passion; roses. Since they get their sustenance from the compost, it seems that when I feed my family, in a way I also feed my flowers.
So when I get the time to cook, we gather round the kitchen table, a bowl of home grown flowers in the center.Turning left over food into compost is not a question of conservation or political correctness.I don’t do because I want to save the planet. Kitchen compost bins are just good sense.
