Welcome to Compost Corner: Worms, Scraps, and Soil Magic at Maple Str

📸 by Jess Frost

Hi neighbors! I’m Jess, part of the compost committee here at Maple Street Community Garden—and your friendly guide to what’s decomposing (in a good way) in our bins.

This weekend, our team of five volunteers hauled in 93 pounds of food scraps and turned two bins. That’s no small feat! And for the season? We’ve officially chopped 1,899 pounds from 369 community drop-offs. Go team, go scraps, go soil!

If compost feels like a hot topic this year, it’s because it is. With NYC’s rollout of citywide industrial composting, more of us are thinking about where our food waste ends up. The city’s efforts are a great start—but here’s the scoop: not everything collected actually gets composted. Some still heads to incinerators or landfills, especially when the system gets overloaded. 

That’s where community composting steps up. At MSCG, we keep things local and looped in. Your food scraps are transformed into rich compost that feeds the plants in our garden—and yours. It’s circular, it’s sustainable, and it’s powered by volunteers (and worms). Swing by during our drop-off window on Saturdays from 10:30–12:30 and grab a bag of finished compost for your houseplants or stoop garden.

And now, the real stars of the show:

THE WORMS.

Our vermicomposting crew—aka the Super Secret Worm Task Force—is tending to our red wigglers all summer long. These little guys are living their best lives, munching on your scraps (they’re especially fond of apple cores and banana peels), and turning them into gold (well, worm castings, which is basically the same things to plants). This Saturday, they produced a full bag of their castings for the garden thanks to your donations.

Thank you for keeping the compost flowing! That’s the soil, for now.

With grit and gratitude,

Jess

Maple Street Compost Committee