Composting Class Teaches Better Conservation

By Anna Scheglov and Peter Blanchard

It’s almost time for the “Compost with Confidence” workshops to end. The Cornell Cooperative Extension has held these classes every last Saturday for the past three months and aims to inform local residents about a growing sustainable environmental practice known as composting.

This workshop series, ending in October, focuses mostly on indoor composting methods more ideal for people living in an urban environment. In particular, this session focused on what balance to use in compost and what people can do in order to continue composting throughout winter.

The CCE offers a training program to those wishing to become ‘master composters’ and so furthers the reach of the Tompkins County Solid Waste Management Division in its efforts to reduce the amount of compostable materials going into landfills. Nancy Arif became a master composter when she recently finished her training.

“There all kinds of classes going on at CCE throughout the winter,” Arif said. “It is a really great, free source to keep our gardens healthy and vibrant, but we’re also not sending things into the landfill.”

Thomas Shelley has volunteered with the Master Composters for the past three years. He thinks that composting is very important, and says the organization often works to bring it to the attention of children.

“Almost every school now has some sort of composting setup,” Shelley said. “They all have little gardens, and they have worm bins, and they have the usual outdoor kind of stuff that kids can do with plants and compost.”

Shelley explains what he calls the simple science of composting.

“When you take something like food scraps that have a lot of nitrogen in them, and mix them with something like dried leaves or straws which have a lot of carbon, naturally occurring organisms will then populate that pile, and will decompose the food scraps and the browns. There are several thousand species in the average compost bin.”

Shelley says it is all these species combined with everything in the compost pile that cause the pile to decompose.

The worm bin technique demonstrated on Saturday is used for indoor composting, which requires warmer temperatures and more attention than an outdoor pile.

Although Shelley appreciates that the artificial environment created by the bin makes growing things very effective indoors, especially during Ithaca’s cold winters, he says indoor growing only works with smaller quantities. “You can do a couple pounds a week in the average worm bin.”

Ava Ryan is a junior, sustainable agriculture major at Cornell University who took the composting training last spring. Ryan feels that composting is extremely important for everyone, both for economical and ecological reasons.

“You pay $15 and get a Styrofoam bin and your worms, and that’s basically everything you need to set up your own home worm bin,” Ryan said.  “You add your food scraps to the worm bin, they eat it and decompose it, and you have compost. It’s just good for the environment.”

Although composting can be done either inside or outside, it requires the temperature to remain between 50-75 degrees. When colder, growing necessitates an indoor environment.

“We’re oriented more towards people in their households and making food scraps and composting the food scraps and things like that.” Shelley explained when speaking of the CCE’s shift towards winter.

The Compost Education Program will be holding their last workshop of the semester on the last Saturday of October, focusing on techniques to compost during the winter.

"Stealth" Composting class held this past Saturday.