Food Waste

Hey guys, sorry for the late blog post this week! I have been extremely busy. This week I am talking about Food waste.

Personally, one of my biggest waste problems, is food waste. In the area that I live, they do not supply food bins for collection and composting. They do this in areas very close to where I live, but sadly not in my area. The best place to start is by reducing your food waste in the first place. This is fairly easy to do, you just have to think about how you could use that food before throwing it away. Can you box up the leftovers, put it in the fridge and have it for lunch or dinner tomorrow? If you have animals such as rabbits or guinea pigs, a great way of using things such as carrot peelings is giving them to your animals to enjoy. Also, simply making sure you cook the right amount for the number of people you have is an easy way to reduce waste.

So what do you do with the food waste that you have left? My household has a wormery that was a fairly recent purchase. We have had mixed results with the wormery. The worms seem very difficult to keep happy, needing a consistent temperature, with the UK climate going up and down so much at the moment this is nearly impossible! All of the advice online contradict each other, our worms seem to have bread which is great, but often end up stuck in the bottom of the bin and do not get through waste as quickly as we were led to believe when we bought the wormery. We initially got a wormery as it was a smaller alternative to a compost bin and was supposed to be a faster process. However the composting process still takes a long time, it is difficult to manage and the worms do not get through all the food waste my house produces. I am considering making a normal compost bin for the rest of my food waste that can't go in the wormery. I am not saying wormeries are not a good way to go, what does not work for some may work for others, give it a go if you think it would be better for you than a normal compost bin.

My household wormery in a cool position in the shed.

Having compost bins at home is a good idea if you have plenty of garden space and a flower bed that needs compost. If you don't have a large enough garden and, like me, your local council does not do food bin collections. There are only two options left to you: putting the waste in your general bin (the very thing we are trying to avoid here!) or making food deliveries yourself to a local farm or place where they take food waste for composting. This is a lot of effort on your part and you would have to do it regularly, as who wants smelly rotten food laying around too long!

All in all the best plan of action is first, reducing the amount of food waste you produce as much as possible, then finding the best way for you to get that food waste to a compost bin. Whether you have the space for one in your garden, even a small compost bin can fit a lot of food waste in it, or taking the food waste to a local compost bin.

Thank you so much for reading, happy composting and here are a few photographs of newly flowering plants in my garden :)

Beautiful White memorial roses, We have lots of different coloured roses in our garden.

A bee, one of many, busy at work on the recently flowered Foxgloves.

Beautiful dual coloured flowers on a Japanese bush (of some description!) I love these flowers :)