It’s one of the best times of the year… it’s my birthday! Haha, I’m just kidding. But while it is actually my birthday, it also, fatefully, falls smack dab in the middle of International Compost Awareness Week, which takes place the first full week of May every year. Happy birthday to me!
At Intertribal Earth Day 2022 in Pauma Valley, CA
With International Compost Awareness Week this year, I wanted to share the hour-long webinar I gave to Terra.do students and alumni last May about how you can add composting to your life. Whether you live in an apartment or house, or lead a more relaxed or a more busy schedule, learn how you can compost in a way that’s specific to your lifestyle.
If you haven’t heard of Terra.do, they are a wonderful organization with the mission of “getting 100 million people to work directly on climate in this decade.” If that sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend you check out their program, especially their Climate Change: Learning for Action course.
One of the things I did to fulfill my hours for my Master Composter certification back in 2019 was write a few articles for Solana Center. Recently, they posted one of those articles I wrote years ago in their newsletter and I thought it was good information to cross-post. =D
Question:“What should I do with my worms while on a trip?”
Answer: Depending on the length of your trip, you will likely not need to do anything at all. Even a new population of worms only needs to be monitored every few days to assess how much food was eaten, moisture levels, and whether they need more food. If you’re planning to go out of town for the holidays this year, regardless of how long your trip may be, consider following these steps prior to embarking on your adventure:
1. Make sure they have a good amount of bedding at a proper moisture amount. Instead of throwing lots of kitchen scraps into your worm bin to make up for your absence, which could disrupt the pH of your bin or even smother your worms, make sure you leave your worms an adequate amount of moist bedding– at least a six-inch layer. Worms can live off bedding material such as shredded paper, coffee grounds, or dried leaves, for a month or longer! Of course, you can still add kitchen scraps before you head off, giving them about twice what you’d normally feed your worms weekly.
2. Ensure your bin is in a shaded area. Worms do best at temperatures between 55°F – 79°F. Temperatures above 85°F can be lethal.
3. If you are leaving during the wintertime, consider insulating your bin with a blanket or soil, or bring the bin inside in case of cold snaps. While worms do better in colder temperatures than hot, temperatures below 32°F can devastate your worm population.
4. If you’ll be gone over a month, consider recruiting a “worm-sitter” to visit and add some food scraps after a few weeks. You can even prep some kitchen scraps in a bag or container in the freezer for easy feeding; frozen scraps can be added straight to the bin. Just make sure your sitter knows to cover the kitchen scraps with bedding so you aren’t greeted by flies upon your return!
When you return from your trip, provide your worms with some fresh kitchen scraps and they’ll be happy to see you!
Happy start of Earth Month! Dan was super awesome and put together this info graphic to show off the beautiful cover illustrated by talented artists, Rong and Vinh. Seriously, look how LOVELY:
Cover Reveal Day!
Look at the beautiful cover for Inside the Compost Bin words by Melody Plan and art by @vuonstudio
— Page Turner Literary Agency (@PageTurnerLit) April 1, 2024
I’m so excited to be able to hold a physical copy in my hands in just a few months, and can’t wait until you all can see what we created together.
I was inspired to start composting because of a new years resolution I made at the beginning of 2019. I had read a headline of an article about a girl, maybe about 11 or 12, who fit all her trash in a single year in a mason jar. I remember thinking to myself, “That’s impossible,” and sort of blowing it off, but for some reason the topic of the headline stuck with me throughout the day– it offended me somehow, bruised my ego as someone who considered themselves pretty eco-conscious. I was arrogant enough then to think, if I can’t do it then how can someone else? But as I thought more about the concept, it dawned on me that I was already considering it impossible without having ever tried.
I figured then that while I likely couldn’t fit everything in a mason jar right away, I could probably fit all my trash in one bin over the course of a year. And thus, the new years resolution: “Fit all my waste in one trash bin” was born.
This caused me to do a waste audit and investigate what I was throwing away. I found very quickly that about 75-85% of what I was throwing out weekly was food waste (banana peels, onion rinds, leftovers that gone bad, etc.). And so I knew if I was going to be honest about this resolution, I was going to have to learn to compost. I signed up for Solana Center’s Master Composter program quickly after that.
And the rest is history. =)
Volunteering with Solana Center to teach others the wonders of compost
To say I loved learning and teaching others how to compost feels like an understatement. There’s something familiar and comforting about returning the resources the world offers you back to the land to nourish it for future generations. Like our very own return to roots, as our predecessors did similarly by burying their own waste back into the soil. A connection to our past for a better, healthier future. The compost process is methodical, meditative, patient– it’s observing nature and mimicking her in a way that shows our gratitude to where food comes from, by giving organics new life, right beneath our feet.
Organics, like food waste, that end up in a landfill are generally wrapped in plastic trash bags, likely never to touch earth in our lifetime, our kids’ lifetime, or our great-great-great-great-grandkids’ lifetimes either. It’s nuts to think that every single piece of plastic ever made since it was invented, is still here with us. You might hear that plastic can decompose in as little as 20 years now with some new technologies, but even those plastics never truly go away, they just get smaller and smaller and become microplastics, to be eaten by marine life and leading to malnutrition, fertility reduction, and mortality.
This is all to say– this is how I got started composting, from a completely different place (assuaging my ego), and honestly it doesn’t really matter why you decide to start composting. What matters is, you start.
Maybe next new years resolution is fitting everything in a mason jar, eh? Til next time.
Melody Sumaoang Plan 