An Earth Day event held at FENCE showed how easy it is to compost.
Composting just sounds like the right thing to do. But the concept can be confusing — not just because it involves piles of used food scraps, but because it’s hard to know just what needs to be recycled, trashed, or sent back home to the worms.
Even the environmentally conscious waste bins at your favorite bakery or burrito shop — the ones that encourage you to put your food crumbs one place, your plastic spoon another, and your coffee stirrer somewhere else again — can engender more anxiety than enlightenment: Oh no, I accidentally sent my muffin wrapper to the landfill! … will they arrest me?
An Earth Day event earlier this week at FENCE (the Foothills Equestrian Nature Center) in Tryon, sponsored by Asheville Greenworks, gave attendees all the right tips about composting at home — how to do it, why it’s beneficial, and three methods to choose from: the tumbler composter, the static composter, and the worm-bin composter.
“The most common misconception is that composting smells bad,” says Christine Brown, an environmental educator with Asheville Greenworks, who led the workshop. “If you are composting correctly, the bin should not have an odor.”
Besides the higher goal of lessening dependency on landfills, composting provides perks for garden enthusiasts. “It’s a free, natural fertilizer that can substitute for chemical fertilizer,” comments Brown.
828-859-9021, fence.org.
