This is my first attempt to do composting.

Next month, I am going to start vegetable+fruit juicing for my health issues. That is going to leave a LOT of peels and dried up (i.e. juiced) vegetables. (This will mainly include a LOT of cabbage and celery, beetroot, carrots, citrus, apple etc.) I do not want to throw this stuff away as this summer I started herb gardening in my 750sq. ft. NYC apartment (with balcony, on the first floor).

Since this is my first attempt, I plan to go super cheap. I plan to buy 3 Homer buckets with lids (5-gallon each) from Home Depot and use it as composters.

DW is wary of smell in the kitchen, hence they will be placed outside (away from sunlight. The balcony is East-facing but due to another building, sunlight is blocked). Along with the juicing left-overs, there will be left-over tea will be going for composting. Paper as carbon source.
My questions are,
- if it will really stink?
- how it will perform in winter? I understand, it will be slower that usual but I don't need this stuff until next summer either.
- how long does it take for the compost to 'get going'?
- if freezing will kill composting? (I plan to add earthworms in it but I read conflicting results on this board).

What other suggestions/recommendations experts here have?

Many thanks in advance.

(P.S. - I really do not have access to dried leaves or cattle manure. I plan to use potting soil that I bought from HomeDepot in these composters.)

Plastic buckets would need holes to drain liquid. Otherwise they can get too wet and become an anaerobic stinky mess. The liquid has to go somewhere.

Compost also needs air, so you can't keep the lids on all the time.

The success of composting has a lot to do with the size of the pile or bin. 5 gal is very small.

In fact, if you're juicing regularly, you'll fill up those suckers pretty fast.

If it breaks down fast, great, but it probably won't in a small container + in winter. Cold weather doesn't kill it, but it does slow down and eventually go dormant when it freezes up completely. It will start up again as it warms up.

Most people doing apartment composting are better off with a worm bin. But it would have to be somewhere it won't freeze and kill the worms.

Difficult problem, composting in an urban apartment.

Also, fruit and vegetable waste alone will not compost well without some carbon materials (dry things like straw, leaves, etc..), but it will be great food for worms.

Martha

By spring I would have approx. and dozen give or take a few.

The old ones would be far more rotten than the newest but never had a problem with odor or bugs and they worked fine for planting potatoes.

Now I just dig a hole in the garden in the fall and dump them in the hole to be used in spring.

So after careful consideration, I decided to postpone composting to April of next year. DW is firm 'NO' on composting in the kitchen. It MUST stay outside, so I will do it in small batches of 3 5-gallon bins in April so that it is available (hopefully) by the end of Summer. I will be adding worms to that compost as well. Plus, during winter season, I am going to put some earthworms in planted soil.

I plan to use the compost for my indoor herb pots and excess will be given away. I suppose, I could completely replace pot soil with the compost, right?

Compost may be too rich to completely replace potting soil. For more about this you can search this forum for POTTING MIX and find some good discussions. Or over at the Container forum.

You most assuredly can compost in NYC in closed containers. I've been doing it for a long time now. However, the five gallon containers are almost useless for making compost - get some big garbage cans. I use the 5 gallon containers for storage of stuff from the kitchen. In the spring I dump them onto the ground, mix it with the leaves I've swept up from the big tree out front, and put that into a large garbage can. Every 2 weeks or so, I dump that out and mix it up, adding more leaves or shredded paper as needed, or letting it bake in the sun for a bit to get the moisture right.

The stuff from the kitchen has a lot of moisture - too much for your compost and it's going to stink.

If you have a paper shredder, you're in luck. Or if you've saved leaves from fall, you're in luck. But that's all too much for the five gallon container.

But there are still some caveats.

First, you'll never get the internal temp you want. But I keep my container in full sun and on a 90 degree day, it gets pretty steamy and hot. It's more like you're baking the compost, but it does break down. That plus the freezing in the winter, breaks down all the cells and makes it a nice compost.

Second, you'll get squirrels for sure, anywhere in NYC. Maybe rats too but definitely squirrels and they'll simply eat right through your plastic containers if they smell something they like. Onions are particularly attractive to them.

Third, you'll also get mosquitos and flies and ants and maybe even roaches in the heat of the summer.

Fourth, you'll need a final use for your compost. What are you going to do with the compost in your apartment? I think it's great that you want to do it and I wish I had all the stuff from your juicer, but at the end of the day, if you have a lot of compost, what good is it in your apartment?

I do it out back, but I own the whole brownstone and the compost goes into the garden. I usually get 2 completed loads a year thru the summer, doing it as I described.

People say you don't need to "turn" the pile, but that's because they have piles. If you do it in containers, believe me, you need to turn it. Just upend the container, mix it up, and shovel it back in. Sometimes I leave it to dry out for a few hours if it's too wet.

It's not going to work otherwise. If you're composting in closed containers the rules are a little different. It's more work than doing it on the ground in a pile, and you'll never get the internal temps you would in a "real" pile, but you can get well over 100F in June/July/August. You also have to turn it yourself - there aren't going to be all the bugs and worms and critters doing it for you, and there's no drainage, so any moisture stays in the container, which means you'll end up with some stinky rotten mass and some completely dry parts in your container if you don't keep at it.

That said, you can end up with perfect compost nonetheless. As I said, I've been making perfect compost for many years, using a few garbage cans.

Best of luck to you!

Karen