“I have to put down the лопату and pick the stickers out by ha | IELTS articles

“I have to put down the лопату and pick the stickers out by hand every other зачерпывание,” says Gretchen who constantly finds stickers in her compost pile at home in Colorado. “No gardener could sleep at night if they left them in the finished compost and spread them around the yard.”

Composting is about accelerating the decomposition of organic matter. Your кухонные отходы and обрезки газона are all going to rot eventually. But a compost pile gets it done faster and, ideally, with minimal smells — finished compost smells like forest floor — and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

The same anaerobic bacteria that make rotting garbage smell so bad also emit methane; home composting focuses on boosting aerobic decomposition, which is both more sustainable and less disgusting.

Home composting can be a fairly hands-off process, but the science behind it can turn this household chore into an optimization mini-game. On the subreddit r/composting, composters fuss over their nitrogen to carbon ratios and post pictures of the thermometers they’ve stuck into their piles. (A very hot pile is an achievement worth celebrating.)

For home composters, vegetable scraps and fruit peels are often a source of nitrogen, an integral part of the chemistry of a compost heap. Nitrogen feeds the microorganisms that break down the compost, generating heat in the process.

Too little nitrogen, and a pile will stay cold and will break down slowly. Too much, and it starts to smell very bad. Maintaining the balance between nitrogen and carbon is key to composting at home. (Other common nitrogen sources include grass clippings, used coffee grounds, and — for the open-minded home composter — urine).

Alas, the produce stickers ride alongside the nutrient-rich kitchen waste. They cling to a spent orange кожуре; they linger on a discarded banana peel; they’re brushed into the compost bucket with a pile of woody листовой капусты stems and carrot tops. It requires hypervigilance to prevent a produce sticker from entering a compost pile.

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