Yes, everyone can compost in winter! After nearly 40 years of making compost and field testing in Kodiak, Alaska, I’ve gone through all the trial and error so that you don’t have to. One of the best parts about organic gardening is making use of all the leftover scraps to be able to feed you, your garden, and your soul! Don’t let something like the off-season dictate your composting abilities, even in the winter. Check out these 5 tips for successful composting.
The Benefits of Winter Composting
If you’re like me and want to eat organically year round, winter composting becomes a necessity. There’s few garden centres open, and why bother once you know how easy it is to make compost at home!?
The point is, I know the frustration when the weather turns cold and it’s not so easy to deal with food scraps or make compost. So, do you stop cooking? No, absolutely not. But in order to prevent organic material from filling up your community landfill, you’re going to have to get comfy with composting in winter!
I’m going to share with you my favorite top two techniques we’re dealing with this fabulous resource so you can take what you learn here and decide which methods work best for your specific situation. Once we’ve covered how to deal with food scraps during the winter, I’m going to share with you the results of my experimenting with restarting a dead compost pile in the middle of the winter.
How you can compost in winter
Put a collection container in your kitchen
Start by dedicating a collection container in your kitchen. It can be a plastic bucket, a used yogurt tub, a stainless steel mini-bin, or a reusable bag. Keep it handy so you or any other family members are not tempted to get lazy and throw away perfectly good stuff. Yes, perfectly good stuff. Kitchen waste is not garbage.
They are resources, and they don’t belong in the landfill where they simply rot and create dangerous greenhouse gases. The sooner we change our attitude and our actions around what is garbage, the better off we will be, and the faster our planet can heal.
Make a compost “closet”
A compost closet is a place where you keep your food waste or kitchen scraps along with any other green and brown materials you have, like leaves or fallen branches. This is where you will keep food scraps that aren’t able to go directly into a compost bin, or directly dropped into the garden yet. Make sure it’s somewhere convenient and keep it covered. What goes in the closet freezes over the winter and thaws come spring. Then, it can just be incorporated into the next new batch!
Dig and drop
It’s important to remember when you dump in the food scraps to alternate with leaves or dry carbon material. My favorite material is leaves that we collect each fall. We store them in bags under the deck and keep a container of them close to our composting area.
Walk over to your garden and on the way, pick up a shovel, because you’re going to dig a hole. That’s right, you’re going to bury the food scraps in your garden. You might be thinking, “Well, Marion, it’s winter and the ground is frozen!” We can fix that.
Dry soil is warm. Soil is workable. That’s what you want, not soil that’s saturated with water and frozen into an ice block. How do you do that?
This raised bed has been covered since late October. I secured PVC pipes into the raised bed, and then covered the whole thing with reinforced plastic. This mini greenhouse is protecting seedlings of spinach, kale, arugula, and other greens that I sowed at the beginning of fall.
Put them in the freezer
If you’re short on space, use gallon ziploc bags or other containers and put them in the freezer! Another good trick for frozen food waste is to keep it separated with peels and other ingredients to make a stock.
Turn the pile less often
In my composting experiment, I revived a cold winter compost pile and turned it into a hot one, in winter! I started by transferring the stalled compost into a new bin and incorporating manure, fish bone meal, food scraps, and leaves. To retain heat, I covered the pile with thick foam insulation. Initially, the pile’s temperature hovered around 40°F (degrees Fahrenheit), but after a few weeks, it reached nearly 120°F.
I discovered that turning the compost less frequently during winter can be beneficial. Instead of turning it every two or three days, I allowed the pile to sit for five days at a time before turning it. Wondering how you can speed up compost in winter?
Read about my composting process in Hot Composting Tips from Alaska
Read this blog post about outdoor compost bins that you can make at home for all my secrets on building a DIY compost setup.
