Making Organic Compost is Easy and Cheap

Posted by Jamie McIntosh Aug 7, 2009

Tonight I was in the mood to do some baking, which I usually reserve for the long winter months when I’m stuck indoors for days at a time. However, when the temperatures hover around 98 degrees, I’m just as apt to stay inside as when it’s two degrees. As I whipped up some oatmeal cookies with peanut butter and chocolate chips, I wondered why I ever settled for mediocre prepared cookie dough. It’s so easy to make cookies from scratch, and the taste is superior. Nowadays, the trend is refrigerated cookie dough already portioned into disks, ready for the baking tray. When did we become too lazy to slice dough from the log?

The same consumers that pay a premium for these bland cookie dough disks might also purchase bagged compost for their gardens, too intimidated by the mystique of rustic do-it-yourselfers that create compost from kitchen and yard waste materials. In fact, it takes no special skills to create compost for the garden. Although, like making cookies from scratch, you might get your hands a little dirty, the process is as easy as mixing a few ingredients, letting it “cook,” and then harvesting superior results. There’s no one perfect recipe for compost, and it’s fun to experiment, so set aside a place for the fall leaves soon to come and make some compost.