If you're interested in composting your kitchen scraps, you've probably wondered just how to go about getting started. Thankfully it's quite easy to compost as part of your everyday kitchen cleanup or cooking routine.
If you're not familiar with kitchen composting, here's a quick introduction: Composting in the kitchen is generally just a process of adding organic food materials to a small compost bucket or bin that sits on the kitchen counter. Either when that bucket gets full, or on a daily basis, you take it outside to a larger compost pile or bin and add those kitchen materials into the mix.
Pretty much any organic food scraps can be added to your kitchen compost bin. The most commonly added materials are fruit and vegetable scraps.
If you eat a banana for example, you can add the peel to your kitchen compost. If you chop up lettuce to use in a salad you can add the heart, or core, of the lettuce head too. You can add onion and potato peelings, apple cores, the parts of tomatoes you don't eat, rinds from cantaloupe or watermelon and so on.
When you add food items like this, it helps to chop or shred them into smaller pieces so they'll break down and decompose at a much faster rate.
Some people don't realize this, but there are many more things used in the kitchen every day, which can also be added to your compost pail. Coffee and tea grounds are one of the best items to add to any composting effort for example, because they're very rich in vitamins and nutrients which will enhance your overall composting efforts. Coffee and tea grounds also help reduce odors that might come from rotting organic fruit and vegetable matter.
Coffee grounds can be added to the compost pail straight from the coffee pot, and you can add the filter too because it's made of paper. The same applies to tea grounds: If you use them in tea bag style, you can add the bag and all to your kitchen composting container.
Plain old paper is another excellent compost material, and most of us have this in our kitchen every day too. If you buy food in cardboard boxes for example, you can tear the box into small bits and toss that into your compost container. Any plain paper bags and wrapping can also be added, and will contribute towards making wonderful rich compost for you in the end.
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