The $5 In(Sink)erator / Garbage Disposal

  

This summer’s experiment in compost promises to be a thrilling one:  GRINDING the compost up before dumping it out back!

I did try this once last summer in the big food processor, with some success (but a bit of a mess as well).  I found this mini unit at Value Village on Sunday (ominously marked “as is”) for $4.99, and decided that once again I’d give it a whirl… GET IT???  Whirl?  Like the spinning scary sharp steel blade of a food processor?

Okay!

So I just tried it now with a small sample load – a couple of onion peels and kiwi / veg scraps, and it did a decent job.  Not fully puréed, more like really teeny chunks but then, the stuff wasn’t cooked at all and I wasn’t expecting much anyway. 

When I added a bit of water, it made quite a respectable slurry, which I then went outside and poured directly on the compost pile.

Benefits of “pre-digesting” compost include:

1. Faster time to break down in the pile
2. Takes up less space in the kitchen
3. Takes up less space in the pile
4. Less attraction to mammalian and other large-scale vermin because it decomposes so fast
5. Hmm… there must be at least one more!

Theoretically, and this, I suppose, would be for people far more crunchy than myself, we could have been fine-grinding our kitchen compost all winter and freezing the resultant sludge in the basement deep-freezer, with the expectation of thawing & transferring it to the backyard composters come spring.  Yup; people do that… but I guess not me.

I guess it’s pretty far gone just to be talking about grinding up my garbage.  But I figure if people can grind their waste in their kitchen sink and then send it into the sewage-treatment system, I can go one better and try grinding up ours for our own backyard “compost-treatment system.”