Composting for the Winter
Re-purposing, conserving and heating your home in one fell swoop!

            In these days of recycling and going green we’re all concerned with notions of how to conserve energy and make organic choices that are good for the environment. Here in the northeast we also struggle with the fear of a cold winter looming in front of us, coupled with rising fuel oil prices, and many households are not sure how they’re going to cover their heating costs for the winter.

            A recent tv segment on composting may have given us an answer to this problem. During the course of the segment the host explained what things to throw into your compost pile (fruits, vegetables and grains and the like) and what things to not throw into your compost pile (tin cans, meat, bones or the family cat poop)  I think his point was to ensure that you have a healthy compost pile, not a sick and unhealthy one.

            However, the brilliance of composting became clear as he explained what happens in there with all that garbage.  It seems that composting involves the birth and breeding of gzillions of tiny organisms who all crawl around in a hurry, trying to decide which of your leftovers they’d like to eat.  While that’s pretty interesting in itself, the real kicker is that the activity of these little microscopic creatures evidently generates heat, and a lot of it. He mentioned that the center of the composting pile will heat up to somewhere between 120 degrees and 150 degrees.  Heck, that’s almost hot enough to cook dinner with. 

            Luckily, my brain is able to synthesize all the most pertinent things in the life of the hardy New Englander, and I was able to come up with a very organic (and I do mean “organic”) solution to our home heating woes, which is simply…

Let’s all build compost piles in our living rooms!

            I guess it’s true that the best solutions are usually the simplest ones, as this takes care of much of your garbage and heats your house in one neat (ok, maybe it won’t be neat) solution.

            If you’re wondering how to make you own compost pile, and assuming that this is one of those articles that talks about great solutions without actually giving you the solution, then have no fear because I’m ready to impart with the instructions for making your own compost pile right in the center of your living room.  First, construct some type of enclosure for your pile. It could be made of chicken wire or could even be a sandbox or possibly one of those small plastic swimming pools for toddlers.  I think an enclosed that is six to ten feet in diameter should be fine for most homes.  Then dump in a bed of leaves and twigs and stuff and you’re pretty much ready to begin the fun part, which is to simply toss in any food you don’t want to eat.  Imagine sitting on the couch, eating a salad while you watch “Survivor Bangladesh!” and when you decide that you’re done with the salad you just dump the remainder into your compost pile.  Or how about when you’re eating some cold, greasy thai food from one of those white cardboard boxes?  Had enough?  Then just dump it in the compost pile. This goes for cold pizza, noodles, stale bread, rotten apples, etc… not to mention the normal things you might toss out, like orange peels and the occasional half eaten grapefruit.

            And you’ll never have to make banana bread again, as rotten bananas will serve a better purpose by heating your house than wasting a couple hours of your time mushing up rotten bananas.  I’m not sure what the experts would say about coffee grinds, but I can only imagine what the pizzazz and energy a good jolt of coffee would give your micro-organism community. Think of your compost pile as a sort of science experiment, as once it gets going it’s likely it will try to consume just about anything you toss in there, so it’s sort of like having a goat in your living room, which would certainly give you the opportunity to answer lots of questions about what goats will eat. Fighting boredom is always a part of the cold long winters, so experiments like, “hey, let’s turn on this radio and toss it into the compost pile and see how long it lasts”, are the kinds of ideas that can add a whole new dimension to having a compost pile in your living room. The only warning I can think of is to tell you that twinkies will not biodegrade, so don’t even bother trying.  (a silly warning, as who in their right mind would ever throw away a twinkie?)

            As for the heating part, it should keep your living room, if not your entire home, at a nice cozy temperature for the whole winter.  On particularly cold nights you can stick a pitchfork in it once in awhile to stir things up and bring the really hot and stinky stuff to the surface.

            For me, this will mean less garbage to put into my costly garbage bags; the ones that are super expensive and color coded so that the garbage men won’t pick them up unless they’re convinced you spent a dollar and fifty cents per garbage bag.  It will also mean less lugging, as tossing my garbage onto a pile in my living room is far easier than hauling a bag of the stuff out to my curb.

            Also, your compost pile will kill any small and nagging odors you might have in your house…. mildew, pet dander, cat poop and garlic odors will be a thing of the past. And your compost pile can even overpower any commercial air freshener you might use.  The new odor for your home will be more like the scent of a dead donkey rotting in your living room, mixed with wafting fumes of pig vomit and diarrhea, which will be a refreshing change of pace for most households.  If you like the new odor then you might need to remove all house plants from your living room, as these will only serve to refresh the oxygen supply and might confuse your compost pile.

            And here’s one other amazing benefit of composting; by next spring you’ll have a huge pile of stuff that you can use as fertilizer for your garden or houseplants or anything else that you might try to grow. Who would have guess that there would be so many benefits from such a thing?

            It gives one hope, in these times of tight budgets and rising fuel costs, to think that a simple and organic solution to something as challenging as home heating is only as far away as the kitchen. 

by Dave Poole

(Dave has spent years pondering how he might win his first Pulitzer Prize or Nobel Prize and currently wonders if this just might be the ticket)