This week at webmeadow HQ, we got another foot of snow. We love snow, because we figure: if it's going to be so freaking cold out, at least there's slippy slidy stuff to play in. However! In the winter we run up against a tricky problem: compost.
Compost! You know the stuff -- also known as "I am voluntarily choosing to have food rot in this pretty crock on my kitchen counter". You put your food scraps (onion papers, dead lettuce leaves, etc) into the pretty crock each day, and when the crock is full, you take it outside and add it on the big compost pile in the yard. Then you add grass clippings and raked leaves and whatnot to the same pile, and next spring, out comes lovely fresh dirt for your garden. It's the ciii-ircle of life.
That's all well and good in the summer. But in the winter, when the going gets tough and the tough get snowing, trudging out to the (completely buried) compost pile every day when the little scrap bowl filled up was just not cutting it. We needed long-term storage, so that we only had to make the full compost-trek once a week or so. The obvious answer was to start storing the scraps in the big blue bucket under the sink. But, hey, you know what happens if you keep 3 gallons of food waste tucked in a plastic bucket for a week? Yowch. Not pretty, and very smelly.
Here is our incredibly low-tech and yet completely-awesome solution: wheat bran. Not Bob's Red Mill kind of wheat bran, but Poulin's kind of wheat bran, which comes in 25lb bags for about $6.
(Look at that drama! Bran in the snow!)
We sprinkle a generous layer of bran on the bottom of the big blue bucket, and then every day or two, we add a new layer of bran on top of the scraps. It absorbs the weird oogy liquids that come out of rotting foods, and allows us to leave the compost festering under the sink for at least a week without any ill effects.
Nothing smells, and the wheat bran will compost with the rest of the food. A field guide to the above picture: a layer of wheat bran covering: two grapefruit halves (empty), a few paper towels, and some sort of be-stalked thing in the corner. V'GER, is that you?
In fact, if you're like us (and do far more eating than lawn-mowing and leaf-raking), the wheat bran will probably help with the fact that you never add enough of that all important "dry matter" to your compost piles. So, until spring comes: add bran to your compost, and only venture out into the snow for sledding*!
* And feeding the ducks.
