Gardening season may be winding down, but composting season never ends. As a kitchen gardener, I’ve come to enjoy composting almost as much as I enjoy gardening. Making compost is a completely satisfying activity. Kitchen scraps and garden waste are magically transformed into compost that feeds our plants. The trips to the compost bin - even through snow—add up to nutrient rich compost.

When I was doing web research on composting resources a couple of years ago, I came across this great list: 163 Things You Can Compost. Marion Owen’s list includes some things have I haven’t composted (so far), and it also inspired me to make an exhaustive list of the things we have composted in our home composter. Here’s our updated list of things we compost in 2010:

Freezer-burned vegetables, freezer-burned fruit, wood chips, hay, popcorn (unpopped, “Old Maids” too), freezer-burned fish, old spices, pine needles, leaves, matches (paper or wood), hops, old, dried up and faded herbs, spent grains from brewing beer, spent yeast from brewing beer, grass clippings, potato peelings, weeds, hair clippings from home barbering, stale bread, coffee grounds, wood ashes, sawdust, tea bags and grounds, egg shells, grapefruit rinds, pea vines, houseplant trimmings, old pasta, grape wastes, garden soil, powdered/ground phosphate rock, corncobs (take a long time to decompose),blood meal,beet wastes, tree bark, flower petals, pumpkin seeds, expired flower arrangements, bone meal, citrus wastes, stale potato chips, rhubarb stems, wheat bran, nut shells, clover, straw, cover crops, fish scraps, tea bags (black and herbal), apple cores, electric razor trimmings, kitchen wastes, shrimp shells, crab shells, lobster shells, pie crust, onion skins, watermelon rinds, date pits, olive pits, peanut shells, burned oatmeal, bread crusts, cooked rice, tofu, banana peels, wooden toothpicks, stale breakfast cereal, pickles, pencil shavings, fruit salad, tossed salad, soggy Cheerios, burned toast, old or outdated seeds, liquid from canned vegetables, liquid from canned fruit, old beer, snow, fish bones, spoiled canned fruits and vegetables, produce trimmings from grocery store.

and here are some other items we compost that are not on that list:
• SunChips bags
• old ruined straw hat
• ash from hardwood charcoal (NOT from charcoal briquets!)
• leftover oatmeal
• sad old rice
• the lost items from the bottom of the fruit and vegetable drawers
• flour that’s gotten too old
• jack o’lanterns (and other pumpkin shells)
• spent sunflower heads (after Jim has saved the seeds for next year)
• avocado peel (we’ve had less luck with the seeds- too hard)

Marion Owen’s list also included several categories of things we don’t compost, the most prominent being paper products including napkins, Post-it notes, and theater tickets. We have always lived in places where curbside recycling collects paper; we’ve put our paper there, rather than composting it ourselves. The exception to that is newspapers, which we’ve used successfully several times to take down weed patches. To do that, we spread newspaper layers over the area, like behind a garage say, and then put a layer of yard waste like leaves and trimmings to hold the newspapers down. Over the course of a season or a winter, the weeds underneath are thoroughly smothered.

We have no pets, so we don’t compost pet hair or feathers. We don’t have a supply of manure either so again we don’t put that in our compost.

Marion Owen’s list also includes leather items, such as old gardening gloves and worn-out wallets. I haven’t tried composting leather yet, but there is an old worn-out leather wallet on my list of next summer’s science experiments.

What goes in your compost bin?

Janice and Jim Leach garden a backyard plot in downtown Ann Arbor and tend the website 20 Minute Garden.