This week we celebrate 100 editions of the Compost Conversation! From the start, our aim has been to lift compost literacy and composting skills in this community. But, just how many backyard composters are we writing for out there?
Back in early 2023, I was door-knocking around the West End of Castlemaine with a new YIMBY composter, all trained and ready to start their first continuous hot compost pile. We were looking for households willing to donate their food scraps each week.
Not everyone has the time or inclination to compost well, that’s where a community model like YIMBY can catch those food scraps that would otherwise go in the bin and make the best use of them.
Our door-knocking was slowly delivering households willing to sign on to take their first clean bucket, fill it with food scraps each week and put it out on ‘bin night’. But just as many households were saying, “no thanks, we already compost and want to keep doing it”.
YIMBY have never imagined that we would be composting for every household in the Mount Alexander Shire. We love it when people want to do their own composting, returning their food scraps to their own backyard for richer, healthier soils and improved plant growth, it’s the best circular economic approach possible!
On that particular street the rate of backyard composters was well over half the households. That might seem high, but it was not really surprising, the yards were large and gardening was obviously important to many folk in this area. So, is 50 per cent of households in an area composting in their backyards an indicative number?
A recent survey around Guildford captured data from nearly half the homes in the township and showed that close to 90 per cent of households use their food scraps to either compost, worm farm or feed to animals, and are happy to keep doing that.
For YIMBY this means we only need to collect and compost the remaining 12 per cent of Guildford households’ food scraps. The good news is, we already have the two or three composters in that town trained and operational, ready to meet that need.
So, Guildford is getting close to being a 100 per cent backyard compost community! Might that be an achievement all our communities could aim for?
The Compost Conversation is written with all of you backyard composters in mind. Every household we have knocked on the door of, every doorstep chat we have had about how you compost, how the compost is going and what tips and tricks might make it go better, these are all integrated into this column.
Thanks to every one of you who reads, enjoys and engages in the conversation, on the doorsteps or down the street, via email messages or at one of our workshops.
We truly are a community that loves gardening and is dedicated to making good compost to feed our soils.
I think perhaps this region could be named the Compost Capital of the country.
– Joel Meadows works with *Yes In My Back Yard, (YIMBY), a community-scale composting initiative in Castlemaine and surrounds. Send questions or comments to hello@yimbycompost.com, or to book in for a compost workshop.
