This podcast is part of a series Black Gold Rush: The Race to Reduce Food Waste and Save Soil sponsored by 11th Hour Racing.

Subscribe and listen on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast.

This transcript was edited for clarity and length.

Rob Smith

Welcome to Blab Lab, a monthly podcast from the reporters of ecoRI News, where we break down the critical environmental issues facing southern New England today.

I’m reporter Rob Smith, and today we’re talking compost. It might be winter, but it’s never too soon or too late to start composting at your home.

On the show today, we have Charlotte Canner, a composting educator and the recycling coordinator for the towns of Narragansett and South Kingstown. Charlotte, thanks for coming on the show today.

Charlotte Canner

Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

Rob Smith 

Can you tell us when you first learned about composting?

Charlotte Canner

I’m going to shout out my mom right off the bat here. I have been composting for as long as I can remember. Because we composted at home growing up, I always separated out my food scraps, put it in a bin, and my mom made a pile in the backyard, and I’ve always felt very weird about throwing my food scraps in the trash.

Rob Smith 

That makes a lot of sense. When I table and I talk to people, I get a lot of people asking me about composting. The thing I ask them is, how did you learn? Because I learned from my dad and my grandmother growing up, and then I went out into the world and met people, and it turns out most people don’t actually compost or know what it is or how to do it. So I always like to ask, hey, how did you get started? And it’s always, yeah, someone taught me.

Charlotte Canner 

It’s just very, very deeply ingrained.

Rob Smith 

So about 10 years ago, you started really turning this more into a passion. Can you describe how you got more involved in composting?

Charlotte Canner 

Yeah, I was living in San Francisco at the time, and I took a three-month gardening and composting educator course at a community teaching garden there called Garden Food Environment, and from then on, I met my current partner, so that was exciting, and I became very interested in composting that way.

I took more classes about soil, regenerative agriculture, gardening, diversity, biodiversity. And that class was also really important for me, because it taught me that I liked teaching, so I kind of became a composting educator from there.

Rob Smith 

That’s great. That’s awesome. Yeah, teaching scenarios always made me realize I don’t want to be a teacher, but that’s great.

Charlotte Canner 

I don’t teach adults. I’ll say that. I mean, I will teach kids, but I usually teach adults.

Rob Smith 

I’m sure that helps a lot more. So tell us some of the do’s and don’ts of composting. If I’m someone who’s never composted before, which is likely, what’s the best way for me to get started?

Charlotte Canner 

So if you have a backyard space, composting is very doable. I don’t recommend throwing things in a pile or just throwing things out in the woods or whatever. I do recommend for people just starting up to build some sort of structure. Rhode Island Resource Recovery sells bins for relatively cheap.

You can buy them pretty much anywhere, or just a pallet bin. You know, make a little container out of pallets. Just a wire cylinder works as well. And then we want to make it easy for ourselves. So collect the food in the kitchen, have some sort of container ready for you to put food scraps in when you’re chopping your vegetables. Make it, you know, easily accessible, easy to open. The easier you have it, the more you’ll do it.

Same with where you want to put your pile in the backyard, or your bin in the backyard. You want to put it maybe not next to your house. Composting has the small potential to invite pests, so we don’t want it right up against the house, but we do want it somewhere that’s not all the way deep in the woods where you don’t want to go to make it easy for yourself.

Rob Smith 

So you need some kind of vessel. You need some kind of container. How do you know what is supposed to go into your composting, because you need browns and greens, right?

Charlotte Canner 

I think the biggest mistake a lot of people make is not having enough brown material. So that’s the dry, woody material, leaves, wood chips, cardboard, paper. All this stuff is called carbon material or brown material, and when we don’t have enough of it, it causes smell, stinky bugs, and it can attract pests.

Always making sure you have that at the ready is really important. Right now is a great time. Leaves are falling or have fallen, so make a big pile, or put it in a bin next to your compost bin, and so you’ll have those leaves at the ready every time you’re dumping your food scraps. You can put one to three buckets of carbon into your compost bin along with your food scraps.

Rob Smith 

And what should the ratio be? How much scraps versus how much brown stuff?

Charlotte Canner 

The general rule of thumb is one vessel or bucket, I would say, of food scraps, to three buckets of carbon material. It depends on the carbon material, if we want to get really technical, but if you’re using leaves and wood chips, one to three is good, and we’re going by volume, not weight.

I also recommend just going a little heavier on the carbon material, especially. Actually, if you’re a little unsure, the worst thing that would happen if you use too much carbon material is that it gets a little dry and things aren’t really breaking down fast enough. But that, I think, is a better risk to take than having it be too wet and smelly and stinking like sludge.

Rob Smith 

What about if you live in an apartment? What’s the best way you can get into composting if you have limited backyard space?

Charlotte Canner 

That’s a great question – we don’t all have outdoor space. One thing is to talk to your neighbors. Not, maybe not in the same building. Well, maybe in the same building, maybe you all want to team up and find a small space to compost together. Maybe your other neighbors who do have backyard space, or maybe they’re willing to take some more food scraps.

There are options in Rhode Island to hire private haulers. There are two that I know of depending on where you live, Black Earth Compost and Bootstrap Compost. I also recommend talking to your local government, talking to your local recycling coordinator, talking to your Department of Public Works, and expressing interest in alternative options for composting. And as a community, you can create a small-scale community compost or some other alternatives.

Rob Smith 

They are starting to move that well; some towns, a few towns, are starting to move that way. I know. I think it’s Bristol or Warren that’s piloting its own compost pickup, food scrap pickup. Other than that, there’s really not a ton of it; that really depends on town to town resources.

Charlotte Canner 

Yeah, but I think it’s really important to, you know, express the interest, go to your council town council meeting. Talk to your DPW. If they know that it’s of interest to residents, then that will put the pressure on them to do something.

Rob Smith 

Can you tell us what happens with the piles in winter? I mean, where it’s freezing today, I hate it, but I know compost piles need to be a certain temperature. What should people be on the lookout for when it gets colder here in Rhode Island?

Charlotte Canner 

Yeah, so what happens in winter is that things just slow down. This doesn’t mean you can’t compost in winter. It just means you might be throwing food scraps on top of food scraps on top of food scraps, and there will be very little compost made.

The cold slows the microbes down. They don’t decompose this fast. You might just have a lot of frozen food scraps. I still recommend adding your food scraps along with the leaves and the carbon material throughout the winter, because, you know, once those temperatures heat up, or maybe we have a random warm day, those microbes will wake up and start their decomposition again. There’s no reason not to compost.

Rob Smith 

In winter, the microbes don’t die. They just kind of go dark. If I want to make a compost pile in my backyard, what’s the best way to avoid pests, rats, squirrels, whatever pests I might be worried about. How can I avoid that?

Charlotte Canner 

There are a few things to pay attention to when you’re avoiding pests. Well, one, I’m just gonna say they compost in New York City. That’s what I like to point out. When we’re scared of rats, they do it there, so we can do it in New York City.

There are a few organizations. The one off the top of my head is, I think they’re called Compost Power, and they started in Red Hook, where they have composting in open piles, big wide rows. And then there are, I believe, I just watched a webinar where they were talking about how they’ve partnered with the housing authority to do some small-scale composting.

Charlotte Canner 

All that to say is that it’s possible [to compost] with rats around. The things you want to think about is, you want that carbon material that I’ve already talked about many times that is your key to reducing odor.

So always, every time you put those food scraps in the bin, make sure you have a nice, thick layer of carbon on top that will reduce the odor and potentially access to the food scraps around your composter.

You want to keep it kind of cleared of debris, plant material; if it’s more open, rats are less likely to hide and tunnel and get access to your compost bin.

I also teach integrated pest management, and that’s one of the tenets of reducing rats, is to reduce clutter, because they like hiding spaces. I also recommend if you are worried about rodents, using quarter inch hardware cloth, which is like a wire mesh material. It’s a smaller gauge than poultry wire, because mice and young rats can fit through a hole size of pencil.

I recommend using the hardware cloth to secure weak points in the compost bin. Some people, just like, have their walls or, you know, wood and hardware cloth.

I don’t recommend open pallets. If you’re using a pallet, I would secure it with hardware cloth. And even plastic bins can be secured with hardware cloth as well, because rats will chew on that plastic.

And then also lay down the hardware cloth underneath the bin to reduce rats digging and then just being active around your compost pile, turning it occasionally, checking it out every couple of days, more foot traffic around the pile will reduce rats.

Rob Smith 

If you have pets, they like to chase whatever they can find in the yard. That’s what I found to be great. In my experience, my dogs would do a better job, I think, a little bit, of keeping stuff out of my yard. But how long can people expect it to take for food scraps to turn into compost?

Charlotte Canner 

That depends on a lot of factors. If we’re super active, we’re chopping the material, we’re turning it, it could be as little as two to three months, but most people aren’t doing that in their backyard because that’s a lot of work.

Oftentimes it could be six to 12 months. A lot of the compost bins have little doors on the bottom where the more finished compost is at the bottom, so you can kind of open up the door on the bottom and scoop the more finished compost out.

I used to be an anti-tumbler person. Your tumblers are another kind of bin container. I have found that they are actually great additions to a bin. If you’re worried about pests, using a tumbler to start your composting initially, kind of put the food in the in the tumbler, add some leaves or some pine shavings, let it pre-compost, and then once that’s full, put it in a bin, that will also reduce odors and smells, and also helps you build a bin all at once, which can then decompose quicker.

Rob Smith 

Are there other reasons you don’t like tumblers? They’re very popular in the stores.

Charlotte Canner 

I’m now pro-tumbler. I do use a tumbler now. I used to be an anti-tumbler, and the reasons were just that they freeze.

They are more likely to freeze in the winter. And you do have to kind of start it like a yogurt starter. You do have to add some compost or some material to kind of get it breaking down a little bit faster. But I actually use a tumbler now too, in addition to a bin.

Rob Smith 

Do you find it’s harder to get the temperature starting higher in the tumbler?

Charlotte Canner 

Oh, yeah, you’re very rarely going to get warm compost. I did have a steaming tumbler the other day, but I have to say it was really cold out. It wasn’t hot, it was just warmer than the air.

Rob Smith 

Full disclosure, I have a tumbler. It was a wedding present. From one of my wife’s aunts, because she’s very into vermicomposting now, so she’s got like, four boxes of worms at her apartment.

Charlotte Canner 

I could talk about worm composting.

Rob Smith 

That’s a good segue. Full disclosure, I don’t like the tumbler that much.

Charlotte Canner

I’m going to give you advice on how to use it better.

Rob Smith 

It’s just it doesn’t hold as much as I would like, because I have a lot of leaves, it doesn’t hold as much.

Charlotte Canner 

If you’re using a tumbler, I have learned that, instead of putting leaves in there, because leaves are very bulky and will help fill up the tumbler really fast, use pine shavings and you don’t need as much, because our wood shavings are really high carbon, so you only need, like, a scoop or two per bucket with your food scraps, because that just balances out the carbon ratio, and it doesn’t take up as much space. So how I’m using it is I fill the tumbler, and then once the tumbler is full, I empty it and put it into a bin, and then I keep filling the tumbler.

Rob Smith 

That’s interesting. So talk to me about vermicomposting. I know that is an option we’ve written a little bit about. I have not personally written about it, but I do know more than a handful of people who are using worms to process compost. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Charlotte Canner 

Actually, that is another great option for people who don’t have outdoor space or have really small outdoor space: worms. Worm composting can be done in, you know, a Rubbermaid tub, really small. You can keep it in your kitchen. You can keep it in your basement.

Worm composting, we’re focused on the worms eating the food, and we’re capturing their castings, which is a fancy word for poop, whereas the bin composting that we’ve been talking about is more about the microbes and the fungi that’s breaking that down. When we’re working with worms, most of the same things apply.

We’re still going to give them food scraps. We do want some carbon material, but it’s not as much of an issue. They do like a bedding of newspaper or cardboard, and then we can give them their food scraps. There’s just a few things that they don’t like.

Same as backyard bins, we don’t give them meat, dairy or really greasy foods. We don’t give worms citrus or really, alliums, onion, garlic, scallions, things like that. The oils in citrus and alliums can harm their skin. I mean, you can do like a little bit, but they’re probably going to avoid it and they probably won’t break it down. So it’s probably best to keep it out.

Rob Smith 

Why can’t we put in meat, dairy and other fatty stuff?

Charlotte Canner 

It just isn’t going to break down fast enough, and it’s probably going to stink and maybe attract pests that we don’t want.

Rob Smith 

Okay, cool. Was there anything else you wanted to mention before we let you go?

Charlotte Canner 

I just wanted to share that I’ve only been in Rhode Island for a year, and I kind of dove headfirst into the composting world here, and for a small state, there’s a lot of excitement and a lot of activity.

I just learned a lot.

There’s amazing organizations that I’ve kind of volunteered with and learned about. So I’m just really excited to be here and shout out to food recovery for Rhode Island. That’s kind of where I got my start a year ago. It’s just very exciting. There are a lot of very passionate people.

Rob Smith 

Thanks so much, Charlotte, for coming on the show, and thank you to our listeners for following along. We want to thank Vanessa Carlton for letting us use her song “Willows” for our theme song, which you hear at the beginning and end of every episode.

I want to thank LitArts RI for letting us use their recording studio to record every episode of our podcast. And thank you to Avery Brookins, a producer and editor, and everyone else at ecoRI News who makes all this possible. Until next time, you can read more Rhode Island environmental news at ecori.org and if you want to learn more about Charlotte and the work she does, you can check out her website.