Good Question: Kitchen Scraps and No Garden?

Note: Include a pic of your problem and your question gets posted first. Email questions and pics with QUESTIONS in subject line to: green@apartmenttherapy.com

Mike needs some advice on garden-less composting:

Dear Re-nest,

Here's the deal: I live in a small New York city apartment with no garden of my own. I don't want to throw my kitchen scraps out. I'd like to start composting, or at least do something useful with them, but what can I do if I don't have a garden? And is it really so bad to throw those kitchen scraps out? What's a lowly garden-less apartment dweller to do?!

Thanks,
Mike

Image via Flickr member normanack licensed under Creative Commons.

Comments (6)

You can do two things...

Container garden! Even your little potted friends will enjoy the compost that you make!

When you find you have too much, put it on CL as FREE. Other people would love to have it, too!

Try searching for a community compost bin. You can take your scraps there, and other people in the community can take from the bin, if they need. There might be one in your area.

Mike:

I live in a small garden-less NYC apartment as well. I wrote a blog post about urban composting recently: http://itsagreengreengreengreenworld.blogspot.com/2009/02/urban-composting.html

There are several public places you can take kitchen scraps for composting in NYC. Check out http://www.greenapplemap.org/page/compost for locations.

If there's a location that's convenient for you, it's fairly easy to save up scraps in the freezer until you can take them to a drop off point.

per SoSue, in nyc you can freeze your food scraps until you can drop them off at various community bins. Union Square farmer's market has one, managed by Lower East Side Ecology Center.

In Brooklyn the Ft Greene greenmarket also accepts kitchen scraps. Try searching your local greenmarket first to see if they take scraps, otherwise check out a local community garden -- many would be happy to take your scraps!