Things you wanna keep out of the compost

In my last entry, I discussed the kinds of items to be included in the compost. In fact, I found a whole list of bizarre things that can be included in the compost, ranging from pet fur to road kill (not quite applicable here, unless you're talking about the poor animals that mysteriously end up dead on the PIE...). Today, let's talk about things we want to avoid having in our compost.

Since the whole reason why we want to compost is so we know exactly what we're feeding our house herbs and food plants with, it might defeat the purpose a little to include the following:

1. Tissue with our/someone else's mucus. This may sound a little obvious, but since tissue is one of those paper products that we can include in our compost, I imagine when we're collecting stuff to recycle, we might just include one of these by accident. Do be careful, because we don't want to be feeding our compost viruses!

2. Leftover meat (either cooked or raw). The C-project described here is meant to be an indoor endeavor.  So meat products are a big no-no. Not only are they slow to compost, they might attract the wrong company with bad odors. So if you're thinking of composting leftover food, make sure you filter out those meat.

3. Pet poop. For the same reason why we want to avoid mucus-covered tissues, we want to avoid poop. Adding them to the pile only brings you more complications, in the form of bacteria and parasites, to name a few. There's also the matter of hygiene - my compost bin is right by my kitchen sink, so I wouldn't want poop anywhere near where I am handling food.

4. Diseased anything. There are many sites that advice against including diseased plants. I know it's tempting to just include those greens that used to do so well in your garden. But, if including them makes it impossible to use your compost soil for your new plants, I think it's better to just avoid them.

There are many other things that different sites and books recommended excluding from our compost. I think as beginners in indoor composting, we should avoid all things that are known to smell. If you have your compost in your kitchen, another thing to avoid would be having items that breed or contain bacteria around. I guess if we followed all these precautions, our composting project should be a fun one!

Here's a list of the sites I referred to while preparing this entry...
>> 22 things you didn't know you could compost, WebEcoist
>> 7 things you should never compost, Veggie Gardener
>> How not to compost: 10 things to leave out of the bin, Planet Green