Skip to main content

How to start composting at home

[ad_1]


Leftover salad and the pear you forgot about inthe back of the fridge don’t belong in a landfill. Instead, toss organic waste into a backyard compost pile to transform that refuse into nutrient-rich ­fertilizer for your lawn and garden. Inside the mound, a community of worms, bacteria, and other microorganisms breaks down the natural junk. Here’s what you’ll need to get started making your own brown gold.



1. Sort it out



Start in the kitchen by separating the organic stuff. The Full Circle Breeze Bin holds more than a half-gallon of waste, and biodegradable liner bags facilitate transfer to a bigger heap. Vents ­encourage airflow to reduce ­fruit-fly-luring smells.



2. Bring it outside



Eventually, put the crud from your kitchen bin into one chamber of the Hotfrog Tumbling Composter. That will be your active pile, where the decomposition happens; the other side stores finished mulch. Spin the drums to give the debris the oxygen it needs.


3. Stir it up



Though handy for mixing free-standing piles, the Bosmere P845 Compost Aerator can also help you agitate just the soil’s surface in a large tumbler. Hinged wings at the end of the tool naturally fold as you push them into the pile, and unfold with each mulch-stirring pull.



4. Check the temp



Peak decomposition occurs between 104 and 140 degrees. Spike above 165 degrees, and you risk offing the bugs. The ­Reotemp Backyard ­Compost Thermometer shows the zones so you know when to mix the pile to cool down the bacteria with some fresh air.



Live in a city? No outdoor space?



If you don't have anywhere outside to store your compost, consider housing your scraps in the freezer. They'll stay stink-free and won't attract unwanted house guests like flies or roaches. This silicone container fits inside your freezer door. When it's full, dump the contents into a compostable bag and take it to one of your city's drop-off points.


This article was originally published in the Summer 2018 Life/Death issue of Popular Science.




[ad_2]

Written By Stan Horaczek

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

With Operation Popeye, the U.S. government made weather an instrument of war

[ad_1] It was a seasonably chilly afternoon in 1974 when Senators Claiborne Pell, a Democrat from Rhode Island, and Clifford Case, a Republican from New Jersey, strode into the chambers of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for a classified briefing. While the meeting was labeled “top secret,” the topic at hand was rather mundane: They were there to discuss the weather. More specifically, Pell, the chairman of the now-defunct subcommittee for Oceans and International Environment, and his colleague were about to learn the true extent of a secret five-year-old cloud seeding operation meant to lengthen the monsoon season in Vietnam, destabilize the enemy, and allow the United States to win the war. Though it cycled through several names in its history, "Operation Popeye" stuck. Its stated objectives—to ensure Americans won the Vietnam War—were never realized, the revelation that the U.S. government played God with weather-altering warfare changed history. The...
Post a Comment
Read more

University supercomputers are science's unsung heroes, and Texas will get the fastest yet

[ad_1] Supercomputers are powerful machines with great names—Blue Waters, Bridges, Jetstream, Comet. But a new one will soon be joining that list: Frontera. The $60 million machine will live at the University of Texas at Austin and is scheduled to come online next year. “It will be the fastest machine ever deployed at a university in the US,” says Dan Stanzione, the executive director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center. With supercomputers, the title of fastest is a moving target—what’s perhaps more important is not the exact ranking, but that they’re available for researchers to use in the first place. Right now, the fastest supercomputer in the world is called Summit, and it’s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, part of the Department of Energy (DOE), and is specifically tailored for AI. But supercomputers located not at government labs but at universities—like Frontera and its ilk—play a crucial role in the ever...
Post a Comment
Read more