By Emily Davis, Member, Southeastern Pennsylvania Group
My journey in composting began in the 1980’s when I was living in a rowhouse. I learned from a neighbor about the ecological value of composting - that in the oxygen poor environment of the landfill, the microorganisms breaking down the organic matter produced methane, a potent greenhouse gas. So, I tried to follow her example with a worm bin. Well not quite – she kept hers in the kitchen, handy to the source of the waste. I put mine in the cellar. All went well, at first but when winter came and my breakfast fruit of choice was grapefruit, the worms did not fare so well. Apparently, they don’t appreciate the acidity of citrus fruits and find the peels hard to break down. By the time I realized this, the worm population was way down.
So I moved on to a more traditional composter. Before I go too far, I should say I am a rather lazy composter. For my next composter, I purchased one with a footprint about 15 inches square and maybe 3 and a half feet tall with a door that slid up at the bottom for retrieving the compost. The picture in the catalog showed the compost just cascading out when the door was lifted. That never happened for me. It was open at the base and supposed to be placed directly on the soil. Since my very small outdoor space was entirely concrete, that was not an option. My only plants were in pots. This time because the composter was larger and outdoors, I could add leaves as well as kitchen scraps, no bones or meat of course. Since most of the rules of composting, like 3 times as many browns as greens and the regular turning, were meant to speed the process, I was content to let nature do the work slowly. My goal was to keep organic waste out of the landfill, creating compost was secondary. I’d had the composter for a while when I got my first digital camera so I decided to take a picture every day to see what happened. It was late summer and my breakfast fruit of choice was cantaloupe so I put the rind of one of the wedges of cantaloupe on top so I’d have something specific on which to focus. To my surprise, by the end of the first week, very little of the cantaloupe was still visible and after 10 days, the surface was dark brown soil.
Getting the compost out of the composter was harder than advertised – maybe because the composter was on cement instead of soil so the compost was more compact. By this time, I had a plot in a community garden and was able to use a wheelbarrow to transport the compost to enrich the soil in my garden plot. I eventually set up a second composter that was next to my plot for material from my garden.
When I moved to the apartment I now live in, I had to divest myself of the composter. I cleaned it out and listed it on FreeCycle. After a few weeks with no takers, I put it on Craig’s list for $10, it was gone in hours. I still had the composter in my garden so each week I transported my kitchen scraps to my garden.
Composting now is very easy for me because my apartment building contracts with Bennett Composting and allows the composting of a wider variety of materials. My community garden also uses Bennett but has much less frequent pickups so it does not permit kitchen scraps. I have the best of composting worlds – I just drop it in and someone else does the work.
This blog was included as part of the February 2026 Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!