So many ways to get involved

Howdy HCCers. There has been a lot going on at the compost collective, so I’d like to re-cap recent compost happenings as well as let you all know about a few upcoming events.

Last weekend we officially launched the Mills St. Composter, the 2nd of our large new 3-bay composters. Yet Scott still performed a little carpentry magic on the composter just today. Now it’s complete with a safe and reliable way of leaving the lid open. I’m lucky to have a husband that enjoys this crafting stuff 🙂

And many of you enjoy knowing that your kitchen scraps are being transformed into something better. Lots of curious Hackett community members have now seen the composter and have been curious about how to contribute to it (signage coming soon!). Most people have noticed that the composters are kept locked. At the public information session I explained why we prefer to collect the kitchen scraps from peoples doorsteps. It’s about gathering up those small buckets of scraps frequently so that they’re still fresh, and then adding a large mound of them into the composter at just the right stage. This allows us to build and maintain a really efficient compost heap, while avoiding problems like pests or odours.

The collection service is also about making composting super easy. For those that sign-up all you have to do is fill your bucket, and remember to put it out on your specified collection day and then we do the rest 🙂 Most of the attendees to the information session were already keen on the idea of composting but we’d love to reach those that don’t really care for compost at all! For those that may have other priorities in mind, we’d love to lighten your mental load while still giving you the satisfaction that your kitchen scraps are doing good.

Mental load is something that I’ve thought about a lot lately. I used to work in scientific research and that is unsurprisingly a very mentally demanding area. But so is juggling multiple domestic responsibilities or trying to live a frugal and sustainable life in todays society. I used to neglect various things (relationships, my own health, etc.) in favour of focusing on building my own scientific knowledge and output but in the end it wasn’t achieving what I wanted to achieve. With a little life experience under my belt I’m better with the juggling act, making it possible to start and grow the compost collective. And seeing as I like to think about the interplay between labour-intensive sustainable action and still maintaining a calm and enjoyable life, I’ve set up an event to explore those exact ideas 🙂

And, as promised we also have a workshop for all of you that are looking to increase your composting skills. Jenni and Brian in Hackett build a large hot compost heap each autumn. Come along to the workshop to help them build it and Jenni, Brian and I can also tell you all about hot composting, worm farming and trench composting (and feeding chickens!).

AND, if you’d like to get intimate with the HCC heaps you can always hit me up for volunteering opportunities. Jodie and her son Louis became HCC’s newest volunteers this morning. Together we turned over one of the compost heaps, fed bay no. 1 at ‘HCC headquarters’ (aka my backyard) with lots of lovely fresh scraps and shredded a big pile of oak leaves and a whole bin-full of stale bread (Louis really enjoyed this last task).

I’m also in discussion with some motivated students around Canberra who are working to divert food scraps from landfill on their school grounds, so stay tuned for more composting adventures.

If you don’t want to handle some of the dirty work with us, you can help by telling all of your friends that we’re aiming to gather up kitchen scraps from more and more Canberra suburbs. With volunteers like this, and champion composters in training, combined with our beautiful and sturdy wooden composters we can recycle literally tons of kitchen scraps and get loads of carbon back into our soils.

Speaking of gathering up more scraps, we are getting quite close to being able to expand our collection zone into Turner and Lyneham!!! Please spread the word to anyone in these suburbs in particular, and direct them to our sign-up page: compost.org.au/sign-up

Thanks to the Hackett Community Association for providing champagne and celebrating our new community composter at the Hackett shops, and to the ACT Government Community Zero Emissions Grant Program for funding the new composter and enabling us to run workshops and more.

-Brook