Living in an apartment is great for keeping heating and cooling costs down – having a floor above you is great insulation – but when it comes to creating compost and growing your own fruit and vegies, conditions are not quite so ideal.

We live in an apartment with a small balcony and a few pot plants but not enough space to start our own home-grown composting system. We were desperate to reduce the amount of waste we generate from the food we eat and to recycle it into something meaningful as part of our overall recycling and waste reduction efforts.

After a bit of research, we came across a compost bucket which holds 20 litres of waste and is made out of recycled plastic. It’s a great alternative to needlessly throwing food scraps into the general waste stream which end up as landfill. You simply throw your food scraps into the bucket, squash it down as far as it can go, sprinkle a sawdust-looking mixture of yeast, bacteria and other natural goodies that help start the fermentation process (it comes with the bucket) then put the airtight lid on to allow the fermentation to start. A family of four might take a couple of weeks to fill the bucket, depending how much fruit and vegetables you eat (you can buy bigger bins for larger, hungrier families).

The compost bucket keeps smells and pests away – when you open the lid it actually smells a bit like beer, and when the lid is on you don’t smell a thing. Plus, the fermented liquid that forms at the bottom of the bucket once you start filling it up is an absolutely unbeatable food source for your plants. After years of struggling to grow pot plants on our balcony, they have become the greenest, healthiest-looking pot plants this side of the apartment building.

All of a sudden, our ability to be sustainable compost-makers started falling into place. Well, at least our ability to create the main elements of the compost – fermenting food scraps. As you may know, for compost to be created you also need grass clippings or hay and some soil, so the fermenting scraps have something to start composting in. And when that’s all ready, you need a garden to use the compost on. We had a full bucket of fermented food scraps, so our next mission was to find out where we could find a place to start composting!

We gave our first load of compost “starter” to our families because they have backyards with gardens, but we thought there had to be a more local way of “donating” our waste that didn’t involve transporting it by car. And there is. We checked out our local council’s website and found a nearby community garden that was willing and able to accept our food scraps as part of the nice, big, healthy compost system they use for all their community garden contributors.

We contacted the community garden coordinator and she invited us to check it out. Armed with our compost bucket, we walked to the garden, located in the middle of an inner city area full of apartments and townhouses, and were excited by what we found.