Our friends at YIMBY have been doing what they can to help support people impacted by the horrific bushfires that have raged through Victoria this summer. This article is reprinted with permission.

What a start to the year it has been! Floods, fires and a local township severely impacted, with buildings, business, homes, gardens and bushland burned.

YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) sends love to everyone who has been impacted and thanks to everyone who has helped out so far. We know there is so much work ahead.

A request came from Harcourt residents worried about food spoilage due to prolonged electricity outages. Could YIMBY take the spoiled food from fridges and freezers and keep it out of landfill? We knew our council was working hard to get recycling and landfill bins in place, but dealing with food waste needed a different approach.

Although we can only deal with a fraction of the spoiled food from Harcourt and surrounds, like everyone, we wanted to help out in whatever way we could and composting is what we do best, so….

YIMBY delivered 200 empty buckets to Barkers Creek and the Harcourt Relief centre to collect the spoiled food in. Full buckets were returned to those spots and Harcourt resident (and YIMBY composter) Angus Evans organised transport.

Last Tuesday, more than a dozen YIMBY composters and helpers gathered to start building four large compost piles to process the food scraps. With so many hands and so many experienced composters, we were able to layer up 400 kilos of spoiled food in under two hours, carefully blending them with locally sourced straw, autumn leaves, horse manure, coffee grounds and chopped up garden prunings.

Over the next few weeks, with more full buckets coming in from Harcourt, YIMBY will continue to layer up and fill those bays. After that, we’ll turn the compost twice for aeration and blending and leave it to cure for several months, taking care to keep it moist enough.

The microbes are already getting active in the piles taking the temperature over 55 degrees and killing off any pathogens that might have come in on the spoiled food. When the piles cool, worms will do their part, improving the quality of the compost.

Our plan is to send the estimated two cubic metres of high-grade, finished compost back to Harcourt residents around the middle of the year for those who will be re-establishing gardens.

We realise this is a tiny part of the rebuilding and recovery process, but we know how important healthy gardens and soil are to the health and wellbeing of people and our place.

We wish everyone involved in the rebuilding and recovery process everything they need for this long journey.

– Joel Meadows and Lucy Young work with *Yes In My Back Yard, (YIMBY), a community-scale composting initiative in Castlemaine and surrounds. Send questions or comments to hello@yimbycompost.com, or to book in for a compost workshop.

Link to original article in the Midland Express here