GreenLiving

Call For Pumpkins To Compost Now

In Green, Living on

When summer is over and harvest colors appear, pumpkins soon follow. We love them to get our homes ready for Halloween and to make pumpkin pies. It’s all part of a tradition. And so is the habit of tossing spoiled food into our garbage bins, including those, once spoiled pumpkins. Why not compost now?!

There are so many kinds of pumpkins today.  From the original orange to white pumpkin, light green, striped, large, super large, and small pumpkins.  Decorating with pumpkins is colorful and, of course, carving pumpkins is fun for both young and old alike. But pumpkin season ends quickly. What to do with them then? Toss them into the garbage?

That’s certainly what we used to do. But why not change our habits just this one time with this one food staple – pumpkin! Why not compost your pumpkins this year!

Shout Out To Atlanta For Composting Now

Ticole Smith founded the organization Compost Society (@compostsociety on Instagram), along with Ashley Renne Nsonwu and Brayan Pinto, in Atlanta, GA. This season, hear and follow Compost Society’s call for pumpkins. She even organized drop-off stations. This kind of grassroots effort is commendable. We should all support it. We should all support composting now. All you have to do is show up with your pumpkins.

Pull In Your Kids – Teaching Opportunity

Answering her call for composting your pumpkins is a nice ritual to get into with your kids. Of course, you want to teach them eco-friendly behaviors like recycling and composting. AshleyRenne created a perfect opportunity to also teach all “city slicker kids”, as one of my neighbors likes to call her Brooklyn NY raised kids, an important step in the cycle of food, or growing food on, and with Mother Earth.

Make this into your deliberate moment to get your kids away from their video games, and all other tech devices. Connect them to the great outdoors.  Expose them to the planet.  Show them responsible smart, healthy, green living on this planet.  Let pumpkin composting now be a teaching moment and fun. Sewing these kinds of seeds – pun intended – is as important as teaching them to brush their teeth.

Ashley Renne Nsonwu pictured with her husband for the announcement of Compost Society’s pumpkin drive.

Compost Now – Call From Towns From Rising Cost Of Trash

Find out about the composting efforts, or shall I say, opportunities in your community. It should be easy to find since today’s waste disposal is expensive and many communities are promoting composting in order to reduce their garbage cost. Some cities already demand separate bins and pick up for food waste. Others provide free drop-off, compost now places at local recycling centers and/or municipal dumps.

Much like recycling in the early 70s, municipalities are getting behind composting in a big way today. In former days, recycling paid for all garbage disposal.  So municipalities happily got behind and into recycling efforts. Recycling paid. The call of the day today is to compost now. It is one way for communities to reduce the amount of waste. Today, composting pays.

So it turns out, that this simple act of composting your pumpkins this year is valuable in multiple ways:

  • It teaches your kids so much about the cycle of food and the growing of food
  • It helps our communities to reduce refuse costs, and
  • It’s good for our planet to use the nutrients in food for new food production

The pay-off is huge.  And it all starts with your pumpkins this year. Use this pumpkin composting opportunity as your way to make a difference!

Kudos to AshleyRenne’s call for composting your pumpkins.  Join her! We are delighted to call AshleyRenne one of our creators on SHGLiving, the home and garden-focused streaming service. Check out her many other super creative healthy living videos and ideas.