Hi! I haven’t bought all of the products in this post. They’re just things that I’m thinking about. But if you like them and want to buy them, please use the links below! I’ll make a little money if you do. You can even hit me up on Twitter @decentmadam and let me know how you like it.

Have you seen the Food Cycler Indoor Kitchen Composter appliance? I think it’s worth an ogle, if you haven’t checked it out already. See for yourself. For the low-low price of $500 bucks (or $600!) you too, can have “compost” in just three hours!

My own compost pile is… not that fast. Not even if you take into account that it processes way more food at a time. In a hot Livermore summer, a well watered and turned compost tumbler can turn out compost in eight to ten weeks. But during the winter, my compost tumblers just aren’t big enough to insulate the pile from the cold weather, which slows down the microbes that do the composting work. In fact, a week or two ago, adding kitchen scraps to the tumbler was a little like looking in the refrigerator; there were big pieces of identifiable meals just hanging out week after week. What changed?

Lets get back to 3 hour “composting.”

Are those skepticism quotes? Why yes, yes they are. What this machine does is, it grinds food into small particles and then uses heat to bake it down into crumbly brown stuff. You can totally use this stuff in your garden. It’ll have nutrients in it. But it’s not compost in the sense that your food scraps haven’t been biodegraded by microbial and insect (or worm) action, and therefore won’t have the beneficial microorganisms that come in garden compost.

Reviewers who love this love that it’s fast, has no smell, and can be used in apartments.

I too love the idea of fast compost! We eat a huge amount of veggies, grains, and eggs in my house, and that makes a lot of kitchen scraps. We can fill a countertop compost bin in one or two days. So turning this stuff into soil amendment quickly is a totally respectable endeavor… but I’m not down to spend enough money to get myself a half decent espresso machine to do it. Instead, I started hunting down alternatives.

Like, maybe it would be a lot cheaper to just buy a, like, compost grinder without the built in oven. That exists, right? Turns out that’s not really a thing. Googling this turned up a lot of regular compost bins and one person who hacked a garbage disposal to grind their food waste for compost. Brilliant! But not lazy enough.

I tried chopping up my food scraps before tossing them into the bin. This effort lasted about a day.

A little more mental gymnastics brought me to the following realization: I already have a perfect appliance for this. An electric food chopper. It’s cheap, so I don’t feel like I’m wasting my investment chopping up eggshells (10 a day some days!). Plus, we drop our food scraps directly in this thing, then grind them and toss them in the tumbler daily. It has replaced our compost bin on the counter. (Sadly, my exact one is no longer available on Amazon).

Result? We’ll, my compost mostly looks like compost, and no longer looks like an outdoor fridge. I’ve had to add quite a bit more browns to the tumbler to keep it smelling fresh and earthy, and that tells me that the processed food waste is biodegrading a lot faster than when it was intact (or that my compost is too wet and needs to be turned more. Who can say?).

Another benefit is that I can toss in banana peels, avocado skins, and citrus peels, all of which can compost, but generally do it too slowly. Who wants to dig through a bunch of finished compost to fish out half composted banana peels? Nope.

Is it gross to use a kitchen blender to chop up compost? I don’t feel that it is, but others may feel differently. After reading about it online, I once tried to persuade my spouse that we could save compost in the freezer so it wouldn’t stink. He vetoed that idea vehemently. “No trash in the freezer.” The food processor doesn’t cross that line, I guess. My feeling is, as long as it’s going out daily and not getting smelly or moldy, and as long as my compost is composting, ima go with it.