After years of living in our own home, we had to move back into an apartment last year due to a change in jobs and a cross-country move. One of the things I miss most about my house is my compost pile and backyard chickens. My girls would come running whenever they saw me coming out the door with my silver compost pail, and they’d spend hours every day picking through the pile for edible scraps, worms, and other yummy treats. It was not just fun to watch, it also kept several pounds a week of vegetable peelings and other food waste out of the local landfill, while providing rich soil for my garden and reducing feed costs for the girls.
After saying goodbye to this idyllic scene, we moved into an apartment with a cramped kitchen, no balcony, and no municipal composting program, so I’ve been reluctantly forced to consign our food waste to the landfill. I hate it, and miss my girls more with every handful of carrot peelings I toss out, so I’ve been researching indoor composting options.
The most popular option for indoor composting seems to be vermicomposting, but as a lifelong cold composter, I’ve never bothered with fussy stuff like the ratio of green to brown waste – I just dump it all in as it becomes available and assume it will come out in the wash. And it does, albeit slowly. With worms, you have to worry about things like pH or they’ll die. I’ll be honest, it seems like too much work to get it right, and I don’t want to be responsible for a bunch of dead worms if when I inevitably mess up. I’m a softie and that sort of thing upsets me.
Compost tumblers may be another option, but I’ve heard odor can be a problem with them.
I was feeling a little discouraged about it all when I stumbled upon this article by The Green Mama, which introduced me to another option: The Red Dragon electric assist composter, aka GG-20. (Note: the article was written in 2012, and the model now appears to be silver.)
According to the review, the Red Dragon odorlessly converted kitchen scraps into compost within 12-24 hours, all in the space of a typical trash can. Zowie! Perfect for a cramped kitchen like mine!
Here’s a video of the Red Dragon’s big brother the White Dragon at work: