Croydon
That was one of the lessons learned by the 30 or so participants in a two-day workshop on municipal composting held earlier this month at Quimby’s farm.
The workshop, titled Composting Training: Successful Municipal and Institutional Design, was provided by the Upper Valley Lake Sunapee Regional Planning Commission, the Northeast Recycling Council in Brattleboro, Vt., and the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services. Participants paid a small fee for food and materials. Workshop attendees included municipal employees, representatives of businesses and institutions, and entrepreneurs in the agricultural field.
Classroom sessions were held in Quimby’s two-door garage. The group learned about municipal and institutional composting programs, what can be done with food waste before resorting to composting, compost biology and New Hampshire’s composting regulations.
Athena Lee Bradley, projects manager with the Northeast Recycling Council, talked to the group about reducing the “yuck factor” when working to persuade people and institutions to compost their food waste.
“Tell them to line bins with compostable bags and empty them weekly,” Bradley said. “Wash bins with vinegar to reduce the yuck factor and keep odors down. A small layer of sawdust over a compost pile can keep odor and bears away.”
Mark Hutchinson, an extension professor at the University Maine Cooperative Extension in Waldoboro and instructor at the Maine Composting School, led the groups in hands-on exercises.
On the first day, workshop attendees were given the task of identifying and grading 12 bins, bags and buckets of different compostable ingredients based on moisture content, carbon-to-nitrogen ratio, density, texture, energy content and odor. The group examined, touched — and smelled — everything from woodchips and shredded paper, to week-old food waste and chicken manure.
On day two, after breakfast, the workshop split into groups and created their own compost piles with the same bins, bags and buckets. After the exercise, and a few more classroom sessions, the group went to a large-scale composting site at Always Something Farm on Route 10, to take its temperature and talk about how the site functioned.