Not Banana Peels Or Coffee Grounds: The Kitchen Scrap You Should Be Adding To Compost

If you've been gardening for more than a few seasons, chances are you're already aware of some kitchen scraps you can reuse in the garden as natural fertilizer, like freezing your banana peels for your future garden or making coffee grounds into compost tea for a boost of nitrogen. However, you may not have heard of some lesser known compost additions, like avocado peels.

Avocado peels add valuable nutrients like polyphenols, potassium, magnesium, calcium, iron, zinc, and lipophilic antioxidants to your compost. They also act as "brown" matter that releases carbon into your compost pile, helping the compost itself stay healthy. They generally take longer to break down in compost than other scraps like bananas or coffee grounds, so it's a good idea to limit the use of avocado skins to less than 10% of your compost pile. While entire peels generally compost in about six months, they can break down much faster if you cut them up.

The peels aren't the only part of the avocado you can compost, though. Avocado "meat" is considered a "green" compost that adds fatty oils to the soil. You can also add the avocado pit, though some gardeners claim that entire pits can take up to a year to fully compost. Instead, consider chopping up the pits or using a blender to grind them into a pulp. This process can cut down the decomposition time to just a few months.

Whether you are learning how to start a worm compost in your kitchen or you already have established a backyard vermicompost set-up, you won't want to skip out on adding avocado peels. Avocado peels are also great for vermicompost, or composting with worms, because red wigglers like to huddle up in them. Unlike standard composting done in a pile or bin, you don't have to cut up your avocado peels when adding them to a vermiculture setup. 

Some gardeners on Reddit suggest leaving the skins whole and slicing a cross into them in order to help promote healthy reproduction in the worm bin. The idea is that this provides the worms with a small space where they can group together to mate. That's what also makes food scraps like egg shells an attractive option. As one Redditor who found their composting avocado peels full of tiny worms said, "I guess worms want cozy places to do their thing, I don't blame them!"