Beginning Composting

This month at Pasture Living, we're doing a series on "I Care for Our Planet!"  in conjunction with us being nominated as a finalist in the "eco challenge" category of the Singapore Blog Award 2013.

This is a guest post by Kiki Rustam, a long time friend, a wife, and a mother of two blessed boys, a Godly sister-in-Christ whom I greatly respect for her love for Christ and her community, and for being a good steward in all aspects of her life.

I want to share our family's latest project. I have been wanting to start composting this since I watched The Johnson Family's video:

However, I wasn't fond of the idea of having red worms so I was very excited when I learned that The Frugal Girl's Easy Composting requires no worm. All we need is a Rubbermaid container. *update: weeks later I was surprised to find that worms found their way to my composting bin. After further reading I learned that it's normal, a nice bonus actually- at least I don't have to buy them. 

It took some time to convince my hubby before he reluctantly agreed (after I showed him how much fruits and veggies scraps we threw away especially since we've been buying more produces from the Farmer Market):

Finally, one Saturday he decided to take out his drill to make his wife happy :)
Details instruction can be found here:

Max decided to help out daddy by using his toy drill:

Somehow watching daddy and big brother at work makes Wes very happy:

Make some more holes at the bottom and we're done with the bin:

Next, we need to find some browns and shredded newspapers:

Then add water, make sure it's damp but not too much (you don't want the stuff to float around):

Add compost-able kitchen waste to the pile. We mainly compost vegetable scraps, used ground coffee, and fruit scrap. *update: we learned later on that fruit scrap invites fruit flies and it's really annoying for us since we often cook outside so we no longer compost our fruit scrap :(

Give it a good turn every couple weeks or so:

Tips:

- Never place meat, bones or animal waste, cooking oil, rice, bread, dairy products, and highly acidic citrus fruit into your compost. These will attract rodents and their friends. To learn more about this read this article: 30 things you should never compost or recycle.
- Do not compost indoors because it could invite pest.
- Make sure your compost consist of 2/3 of browns (the brown leaves, paper, etc) and 1/3 part of green (the compost-able waste).
- To use your compost, mix one part compost with three parts regular potting soil.

Now that Wesley is on cloth diaper and we have this composting bin, our trash has been reduced substantially. Yay for going green :)

Have you tried composting before? Any tips to share?