by Valerie Yule
Our street has three rubbish bins for each house – a big yellow bin big enough for Father Bear to fit in, a big green bin big enough for Mother Bear to fit in, and a slightly smaller red bin for Teenage Baby Bear to fit in.
The bins big enough for Father Bear and Mother Bear are put out alternate weeks, one full of salvage – paper, glass and plastic – and the other full of garden rubbish. We’ll talk another time of how to stop putting out these HUGE bins.
Today we’ll think of the Teenage-Bear-size red bin, that is put out every week, full of kitchen rubbish – food scraps neatly put in plastic bags, and packaging. It is a solemn thought that half the grocery purchases of the Three Bears ends up in the rubbish bin and only half is actually eaten or cleans the house.
And most of this is quite unnecessary, although it gives employment to waste contractors and operators of landfill. How much of our landfill is food! What can be done? Two things you can do are to refuse to buy things in needless packaging, and to find re-uses for necessary packaging.
But re-use your kitchen scraps at home.
Valerie Yule and worm farm
How? Commercial worm farms are expensive to buy and need care.
Make your own by taking the bottom out of an empty plastic plaster can from a building site. Then the construction site has less waste to put in its skip.
Add two three-dollar garden sieves top and bottom, and there’s your farm, placed on damp, loose soil in a shady place, waiting for the worms that crawl through the bottom sieve, to feed on the scraps you feed in after lifting the top sieve. Then you feed your garden and your garden feeds you. If you have no garden for the worm-compost it makes, give it to a neighbor once or twice a year.
That is: The no-care DIY worm farm. Cost under $7.
Take two plastic garden sieves and a can with the bottom cut out, such as an empty plastic plaster can chucked out at a building site. Put one sieve on damp loose soil in a shady place, Add the can. Add some damp earth with a few worms – they multiply.
Top with the other sieve.
Occasionally take rich wormy compost from the bottom, and the enriched soil from under the bottom sieve, when you want it. (If clever vermin can lift the top sieve, put a small weight on it.)
You will be amazed how fast the worms reduce what would otherwise be bins-full of food waste into rich earth. They will take ages before your worm-farm is half-way full.
In your kitchen keep a container on the bench, with a lid on to save the scraps. An ice-cream canister will do, but I have a stainless steel bowl with a saucepan lid.
Add your kitchen scraps to it except bones and citrus. Chopping up big pieces makes the worms work faster.)
I use my bones for soup and then burn them in the barbecue to make potash for the garden. Citrus goes in the compost.
(Some enterprising guys could scout on bikes for find building sites and ask for their used plaster cans, and sell the 3-piece kits for Good Causes. It is such a waste to see the cans chucked out and smashed up in skips.)
People in flats could organise so their scraps went to someone with a garden. Then the gardener could give them occasional fresh produce.
A worm farm like this is far better than putting kitchen scraps in compost bins where rats can get in from the bottom, and far, far, far better than saving plastic bags to wrap the scraps in to put in your rubbish bin for the waste-collector to take for land-fill.
© Valerie Yule 2010
This entry was posted by vyule on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Waste Nothing.
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