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Composting.

Composting is.

Composting is -- beautiful.

Why do we compost our food? We do it because we depend on the earth -- more specifically, the soil -- to sustain us. (For a great treatise on how the loss of soil fertility leads to the end of civilization, read Jared Diamond's Collapse.) Composting, like wiping your ass with Shitbegone ?, is a way to restore to the soil some small amount of the fertility that we take out.

But, again like wiping your ass, composting the right way takes a little bit of knowledge. Luckily, it's really only a little bit, and it's more for our sake than the soil's -- after all, the soil doesn't care if the compost bin is a giant smelly pile of fly maggots.

So here's what you do.

1. In the Kitchen

In the kitchen, you will find a compost bucket, easily identifiable as a bucket containing compost. Into the bucket, you place compostable food scraps. These include:

Uncooked veggie scraps
Eggshells
Coffee grounds
Tea bags

Some food scraps aren't appropriate for the kind of compost sytem we have at Synergy. \\ Do 'NOT' compost:

Cheese
Cooked food
Sticky masses (e.g. bread, dough, lots of flour, large quantities of oatmeal, rice)
Citrus
Dairy
Cheese
Cheese

Again, this is more for our sake than the soil's. Some things, like citrus or bread, take a long time to break down and can even slow decompositing of nearby food. Some, like dairy, create extraordinarily intense odors that attract critters and flies. In the long run, you can compost anything -- composting is a common method of cleaning whale skeletons for display. Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of long-term ability at Synergy, so we stick to the easy stuff.

2. From Kitchen to Compost: After Dinner Clean

After Dinner Clean moves the compost from the buckets in the kitchen to the bins outside. This is where the art (I mean art like preschool fingerpainting) comes in. The trick is to establish an optimum ratio of wet, nitrogen-rich food scraps to dry, carbon-rich garden waste. We do this by layering: a thin layer of food scraps, a thicker layer of garden waste or straw, alternating as many times as it takes to use up the food from the buckets. The layer of dry plant stuff on top serves the dual purpose of making the food underneath less visible to flies and critters, and serving as a source of carbon food for the nitrogen-energized bacteria doing all the work.

By using alternating thin layers, we create a loose enough pile to allow oxygen to diffuse throughout, and thus don't have to turn it all the time. Once a pile is built up to about three or four feet high( it takes a couple months!) , we just move on to the next bin and start a new pile. The completed, three-foot-tall compost pile will then shrink before your eyes, turning into a lovely non-stinky mound of fertile compost in a month or two.

So, in short, here's what After Dinner Clean does:

Takes the compost buckets out to the pile
Spreads a thin layer of food scraps (thin enough to see bits of the layer beneath) on the pile marked Inferno.
Using a pitchfork, spreads a thick layer (~4 inches, so you can't see any food beneath) of straw, leaves, or whatever plant matter is available from the palettes to the left of the bins over the food.
Repeat the food and plant matter layers until all the food is gone.
If you want, shovel a layer of dirt on top to keep smells down.
Rinse buckets, and you're done!

3. The last bit

Once a pile is around three or four feet high, it's complete. Move the "Inferno" sign to the next pile, and replace it with "Purgatorio." If it's dry, it can be helpful to water it with a hose every now and again to help speed things along -- soil organisms need water, too! The pile should decrease substantially in size over the next month or two. Check on it with the pitchfork occasionally, noting how far along in decomposition things are.

When the next "Inferno" fills up, it's time for "Purgatorio" to go through the pearly gates of "Paradiso." Shovel the by-now-mostly-composted pile into the rightmost bin to make way for the next round of cursed food scrap souls. This final step stirs things up a bit, and helps the last stubborn bits of material break down into lovely organic humus.

That's it! Use that great compost to fertilize the garden -- the citrus trees love it if you put a big ring mound of compost around their trunk during the rainy season!