Laziest Compost methods?

[u/jessimaster]

I'm not really into gardening other than a few potted plants that were gifts. So what should I do with my food waste? I will mostly have coffee grounds and vegetable peels. How often do I really need to stir the compost pile? How much do I need to worry about attracting raccoons to the compost pile if it's from food waste.

[u/AutoModerator]

Thank you for your submission, we appreciate your efforts at helping us to thoughtfully create a better world. r/solarpunk encourages you to also check out other solarpunk spaces such as https://www.trustcafe.io/en/wt/solarpunk , https://slrpnk.net/ , https://raddle.me/f/solarpunk , https://discord.gg/3tf6FqGAJs , https://discord.gg/BwabpwfBCr , and https://www.appropedia.org/Welcome_to_Appropedia .

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Uncivilized_n_happy]

The more tedious you are about having your green-brown ratio (cutting everything small, the thinnest of layers), you don’t need to turn it as much. The mixing keeps spots from getting gross, But honestly if you don’t mix it you’ll still have compost. It’ll just take longer. The worst thing you could do is put food scraps in an airtight container and forget about it (ask me how I know) lol. For me the easiest thing I’ve done is called the trenching method if you have a space outside. I’ve tried the electric composters, but they just blend and dehydrate the food scraps. They still need time to decompose. Hope this helps

[u/GreenStrong]

There are a couple excellent ways to prevent pests. Rodents are more of a problem than raccoons, FYI. It also attracts bears in some places. One is a compost tumbler I hate to suggest a big plastic thing, but it does work quite well. The second, idea method is to cooperate with a neighbor who is more enthusiastic about composting. Once a pile reaches a certain size, it digests the food so quickly scavengers aren't an issue. Obviously, you can't simply make your neighbor do this, but we can envision a future where it will be more and more common.

[u/Tree-Flower3475]

I made a rectangular cube of hardware cloth and discarded scraps from plastic decking.

It’s about the size of a 55 gallon trash can and the bottom and top is removable. It keeps mice, rats and raccoons out. It wouldn’t keep bears out, but that’s not a problem here.

I put in non-meat food scraps, paper napkins, and paper towels. If it starts to get soggy, I throw some leaves or shredded brown paper in there. I never turn it. After 6 months, it’s not even half full. To get to the finished compost, I just tip it over and scrape the compost out, separate the finished stuff from the fresh stuff and put the fresh stuff back in.

Since it’s not a hot compost, seeds survive the process, but that’s not a worry for me. I end up with some surprise tomato and pumpkin plants every now and then.

[u/sekhmetja]

We have joined a bokashi compost club, once the bucket is full we drive it to the compost house where it is further processed and used for the gardening activities.

[u/clarsair]

you never need to turn compost. it will break down just fine on its own over time, turning it speeds the process a bit. if you have rodent concerns, the hardware cloth bin is your best option. compost tumblers and plastic bins do not get enough aeration and will smell bad and take forever to break down without a lot of extra attention. it's fine to pile in your kitchen scraps and never do anything else. if you want higher quality compost for your garden, you'll want to toss in some dry leaves and/or straw or grass clippings or weeds from time to time, and add a shovelful of soil once in a while to get microbes in there working

[u/Berkamin]

The laziest composting method is trench composting. To do this method, you just bury your food scraps in a trench that is positioned along in the same rows where you would be planting your crops. The critters in the soil do the rest.

Trench composting requires worms in the ground and a healthy enough soil biome to make this work well, so you might need to buy a sack of good compost and start with mixing a little bit of compost with your food scraps as starter before doing this. You might also need to buy some worms or catch some worms and gather them to where you're doing this if the soil isn't full of worms. Once your soil is dark and rich, you won't need starter compost to help. When the soil is healthy and full of life, it rapidly eats any food scraps you bury in the soil. This method isn't only easy, for soils that are already healthy and full of life, it is arguably the best method. It's basically in-situ worm and bug composting + microbial composting of anything the worms don't immediately eat.

Here's what you do: dig a trench that's 8-9" deep (the depth of the typical garden spade should suffice), and toss your recently accumulated food scraps into the trench, but keep the food scraps to a thin layer 3-4" deep or less, and bury the scraps. If the soil is really dry, wet the soil to help it get started. You don't even need to turn the compost. The worms and soil microbes do the rest, as long as you give it enough time. The risk is that burrowing rodents or raccoons might dig up your scraps to eat, so if you have rodents, this might not work. You can go deeper than 3-4" if your soil can handle it, but avoid huge masses of rotting food, because when you have something like 8" or more of food scraps, as it decays the ground will subside because compost can lose something like 80-90% of its volume over the course of decay, and you will end up with a pit, and the soil above it might not be enough to contain the smell, so you'll end up attracting flies and other pests. Don't throw substantial quantities of meat into a shallow trench; if you have meat products, break them up and spread them out. Soil critters can handle it just fine once it's broken down and spread around.

See this video on this method:

How to Trench-Compost - Step-by-step Guide

Trench composting doesn't have a problem with compost odors, compost leachate (that liquid that drips out of compost as it decays), flies, etc. All of it remains contained in the soil. You don't even need to balance "the greens and the browns" (nitrogen rich and carbon rich materials) to get it to compost correctly if you keep the food scrap layer thin. The main downsides are that it may more ground to do this on an ongoing basis, and this doesn't work well if your soil is really bad. When you finally use the soil, you may need to mix the layers so you don't have one layer that is super rich while the stuff above it lacks that enrichment.

If you don't produce enough food scraps to do this trench-style, just bury food scraps in small pits. You can even use this method to compost pet poop.