Coralie, 29, Glen Eden
Tell us a bit about yourself.
My husband and I moved to West Auckland a year ago with our four young children. I am currently a stay-at-home mum leaving my Early Childhood Education teaching role of eight years to enjoy the early years with our children. I am a keen babywearer volunteering for our local babywearing group, Slingbabies, and I do my best to get involved with activities at our Playcentre, Kindergarten and School. I love getting out in the garden with our children teaching them about caring for nature and how to grow our own produce.
Which composting methods do you use?
We currently have three cold compost bins (two free standing and one spinner), a worm farm and chickens.
When did you start composting?
We started by accident several years ago at our last property throwing our grass clippings and garden waste into a pile. We did not realise how amazing the compost that we were making was until we dug it up to line our new vegetable gardens a few years later, and our plants absolutely thrived. We then started taking it more seriously buiding a new compost bin and adding in food scraps too.
Why do you do it?
We have set ourselves an unusual goal for 2018 – our goal is to fill only ONE rubbish bin for the year with our young family of six. We are doing our best to document this process of waste reduction on our page Practically Green to educate others and show how they can reduce their waste as well. Composting has been one of our biggest and most rewarding steps in reducing our landfill waste. We do it as a way to dispose of our plant waste, food waste, extra paper and vacuum cleaner dust that otherwise would have been sent to landfill. We have found composting to be absolutely vital to reducing our waste, and since using our compost systems correctly, no food waste leaves our property and instead it helps us grow more food.
What do you love about it?
We love that we are making the most of our waste in the most useful way. No only this, but we are saving money and we are using the nutrients from our compost to nourish our garden.
How do you think we can encourage more Aucklanders to compost?
Continue to provide composting workshops all over Auckland making it accessible to all. We should also be teaching children in Early Childhood settings and schools how to compost making it the normal thing to do.
An idea for the future: Another way to encourage composting would be by helping to facilitate general composting in community gardens and schools so that those without the facilities to compost, such as people with no yards, are still able to compost their waste.
Practically Green is co-hosting a waste-free living and composting workshop with the Compost Collective in Glen Eden on Saturday 21 October 2017, 10.30am-12.30pm. Sign up here
The Compost Collective runs free composting workshops all across Auckland. Participants get a $40 discount voucher to use on a compost system that suits them.
