This year has been a big year for YIMBY community compost in Castlemaine and surrounds. We end the year with 43 composters, with 23 of those joining us just this year! These people are turning the food scraps of 573 households and 23 local businesses into wonderful rich compost in their backyards and helping improve our soils for local food production.
We now have composters in Taradale, Chewton, Campbells Creek, Harcourt and Guildford as well as growing numbers in the Castlemaine ‘suburbs’.
YIMBY is now handling about 1800 kgs of food scraps each week, quite a logistical undertaking, and mostly done with human (and microbial) power and loads (and loads) of gifted time from our composters and helpers.
The numbers are impressive, the hours are amazing and the quality of the compost is unparalleled, but it’s the community connections that keep surprising and inspiring us.
It’s now too hard to get all of us YIMBYs (including helpers) together at the one time in the one place, (see photo for about half of us at the end-of-year gathering) so, we have consolidated our composting ‘clusters’ approach, grouping our composters by location for connection and support.
If a composter is going away for a break, or is unwell, they reach out to their near-by cluster friends to provide back-up and support. Clusters also do things like; help each other with straw collection, share tools and resources, help turn each other’s composts, collect autumn leaves and just gather for fun.
New composting duo, neighbours Lucy and Dave in North Castlemaine Cluster, invited all the food scraps contributors from their street to come and have a look at their composting process. It was a fun and connecting way for neighbours to meet and witness how the food scraps they contribute were being cycled back into soil-improving compost by Dave and Lucy in their neighbourhood.
It is stories like these, and the many more that YIMBY folk share with us, that make doing what we do feel so worthwhile. Connection, not just collection, as we like to say.
There is much talk about ‘The Circular Economy’ and ‘closing loops’, and it is happening, sporadically, here and there.
But significant change probably requires a shift in how we view the world and our place in it. Maybe, when we no longer see ‘waste’ and just see wonderful nutrients, ready to be returned to the place of highest value, then we will see cycles really starting to close.
This shift doesn’t require big trucks and large, energy intensive machinery. It doesn’t need big companies with big contracts and higher rates. But it does need a community who can see the value in our resources and who want to get involved in making the most of them together.
Amazingly, we have those people and we have that community! Thanks to every single one of you who makes this possible.
– Joel Meadows, Mikaela Beckley and Lucy Young work 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.
