Creative Composting with Owl's Roost Farm

Allyson Rosemore is one of our amazing Educators and is the founder of Owl’s Roost Farm, an urban farm located in Rockford, Illinois. As a passionate compost expert, Allyson teaches about the cycle of food production and consumption and why compost is important. She says:

A bowl of food scraps next to a bowl of finished compost

We build healthy soil, so that we can grow healthy food, so that we can feed healthy people, so that those healthy people can return their food scraps back to the soil by composting. Sending our food and other compostable scraps to the landfill breaks the cycle, which has negative consequences. It’s a missed opportunity for soil health, and it also means unnecessarily increasing the methane gas we generate. So let’s compost!

Owl’s Roost Farm offers a year-round community composting program, including a winter-only option for folks who have their own compost in the warm months but prefer to not keep it up for the cold months.  How does Allyson do it?

​This photo represents kitchen scraps being combined with spent straw from growing oyster mushrooms. Allyson combines those ingredients over woody debris from clearing invasive honeysuckle, which helps the heap stay aerated without turning and helps the honeysuckle branches decompose faster.  Everything is corralled in place with cattle panels that are lined with cardboard boxes to keep fresh materials from falling out of the holes. 

Compost pile in the winter

Allyson says a fun fact about composting is that the microbiology of the soil the composting materials are in contact with has an impact on the microbiology (and nutritional profile) of the finished compost. This means that choosing your composting site based on what you intend to use your compost for can make a difference.

---

Join the compost party

If you have the ability and desire to compost at home, great! If not, consider joining the Owl’s Roost Community Compost program. It’s a bucket swap program, so you’ll get a bucket from Allyson, fill it up, then swap it for a clean one. Repeat! To compost with Owl’s Roost Farm, sign up through Grown By.