Composting goes in-house

Composting—if it’s good for home gardeners, it’s got to be good for garden centers. That’s the attitude more stores are taking these days as they strive to practice what they preach. Retailers across the country are setting up in-house composting stations to bring eco-friendly practices closer to home base.

“We have a lot of green material that we have to separate from our other recyclables as well as our waste materials,” said Jennifer Schamber with Greenscape Gardens & Gifts in Manchester, Mo. “We can’t compost all of it on-site, so we have a separate yard-waste container that gets picked up weekly and is composted off-site. We have chickens—and therefore, a lot of good $#!+—pardon the language!—so we have a large concrete block bin in the back that we use to compost our chicken poop and other easily compostable yard wastes.”

Jodie Bross, owner of Glenwild Garden Center in Bloomingdale, N.J., said her store is also solidly aboard the composting bandwagon. The company has a landscape division, and a lot of the compost ends up being used on projects.

At the store, they have a rough-brush pile where employees toss things that take a while to break down—like dead annuals and perennials. The compost produced here will often end up enriching the store’s display gardens.

“Inside at our work areas we have separate waste cans for when we’re cleaning inside—plant leaves, etc.—and [containers for] veggie lunch scraps,” said Bross. “We don’t enforce the lunch scraps—it’s just for the people who think of it and know it isn’t too smelly and messy. Lots of coffee grounds, of course!”

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