Getting started with home composting

Food blogger Alex Ryder @gingeybites

Consider composting. You’ll be surprised how little space you need and your plants will be the envy of the street.

One way to reduce the amount of food waste going into landfill is to compost it at home. Two popular options are the bokashi system and worm composting.

They sound scary but they’re really not. Both bin systems are easy to set up and use in a small space (we have a flat) and can be bought online. I have both and a combination of shopping little and often, meal planning and composting means that, in my house, we’re now living an almost zero food waste life. Bokashi is an anaerobic composting system, usually the size of two waste paper baskets. It uses a special inoculated bran to ferment kitchen waste into a rich liquid compost. Each time you add a layer of waste, sprinkle it with bran, flatten it down and leave it alone. Occasionally, you’ll need to drain off the juice that it produces, but that’s it – and, no, it doesn’t smell, other than a mild whiff of vinegar. When my partner first suggested worm farming, I wasn’t keen but now I like to take them their dinner of our waste bits after I’ve finished meal prepping. The worms eat their way through food matter, progressing up through the bin’s trays leaving an incredible vermicompost behind them. Like the bokashi, you get a liquid that can be fed to plants (tomatoes love it) and compost that can be dug into the soil. For more, see: bbcgoodfood. com/home-compost