Why start composting?

When I moved into North Aurora, I had the good luck of moving into the house of an avid gardener.  There are a total of 5 raised bed gardens in our little city back yard, and two compost piles!  I dug them up, and found lots of rich black soil and happy worms.  So I put a 5 gallon bucket in our kitchen, and kept up the composting.  Soon enough, we got chickens, and I got a good incentive to put the kitchen scraps out back before they got all moldy and smelly in the bucket.  The chickens love sifting through the daily compost to pick out their favorite treats - broccoli stems, carrot tops, and bugs that I don't really want to think about.   When I get those eggs with the vivid yellow yolks, I know it is worth it!


What still frustrates me is all of the waste that I can't break down in my dinky two by two foot pile.  It is just too small for the difficult stuff.  Avocado pits will never break down, lemon peels turn into the stinkiest mess imaginable, and any bones would just attract pests.  Pizza boxes give me the most angst.  I know they can't go into the recycling when they have cheese stuck to the bottom, but they are just so big.  Do I really need to fill my entire trash can every time I have pizza?  Usually they sit in my laundry room making me feel guilty until my fiance does something about it!

Our neighbors in Denver have a compost pickup service.  Aurora, across the Yosemite st. border, has no service available.  We also have some predatory trash providers.  The City doesn't have trash as a service, so we all contract directly with the companies in the front range.  My neighbor told me her provider raised their price from $50 to $120 with no warning!  Their trash stayed the same at about 1 bag per week.  She was fed up, and called them threatening to cancel.  I pay about $70 every three months for something I don't even want to use.  So I started dreaming.  What if I picked up all compostables?  I could bring them to a commercial composter, like A1 Organics.  Then I could cancel trash!  Someday I could even have a big compost pile of my own!  I would get a lot more chickens. :)

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