Grossness in my kitchen
In attempt to ease my girlfriend’s disgust with our (arguably) gross kitchen, I purchased her a fancy compost bucket/bin/thingy for Christmas.
ROMANTIC, I KNOW. The way into a girl’s pants always involves ceramic compost bins.
Anyway, due to my working from home and my, essentially, house-boyfriend status, it’s usually my job to empty that shit out into our compost “bin” in the yard.
Every time I do this, it is an adventure. Because we want to approach some level of attempted sanitation, I opted for the white compost bin. This makes cleaning it easier, as I know where the gross shit is, and it can be properly removed. However, when there is SUPER GROSS SHIT in it, the super gross shit becomes much more obvious.
There’s the basic vegetables and egg shells, the occasional remnants of uneaten oatmeal. But there is always – always – a basic slime of coffee grounds, that cover all items and flow to the bottom, sitting there, only to be removed by a blast of the hose.
This shit is like fine sand, except when it gets shaken out and on my pants I fell like Juan Valdez just took a shit on me. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, moldy bits of old cucumber will be embedded in the coffee mud like shrapnel in flesh of a morbidly obese man who somehow wandered into a mine field (yeah, I know that doesn’t work, but I like it). And if I’m REALLY LUCKY, some old bananas will be sitting at the bottom, smelling like some combination of UNH Cycling van with a hint of throwup.
But it’s not as smelly as the time we made shrimp stock. That was a bad idea.
You know, this might be a heretical idea for hippie composters, but you could just throw away your coffee grounds. Probably doesn’t add that much volume to the compost anyway…
Yeah, it’s not much volume – but the problem then becomes having a massive wet mess in the garbage bag. Which has ripped open on more than one occasion.
Also, caffeinated worms are more efficient.
Did you ever think it migth not be the compost making your apartment smell? Perhaps it is your lack of deodorant or hair washing?
Are you using compost bags? The ones I use last about a week for us before they start to leak. http://www.dwellsmart.com/Products/Cleaning-Tools-and-Supplies/Kitchen-Compost-Bags