Not Coffee Grounds, Not Banana Peels — The Inedible Scrap You Can Add To Compost

Whether you have a compost bin in the backyard, a large compost pile that you keep having to turn, a vermicompost bin on the patio, or even a small kitchen composter in your tiny apartment, there will always be a question as to whether your compost will love a certain kitchen scrap or not. While you should think twice before putting onion scraps in your compost, other inedible scraps like coffee grounds and banana peels are all perfectly fine, along with another item that you won't want to eat – burnt toast.

Let's face it – there are always going to be times when you or someone else in your household has turned the toaster up too high, and you end up with a charred piece of bread that is not what you had been looking forward to for breakfast. Instead of tossing that cremated slice into the garbage, take it out to your compost bin instead. After all, bread is made from natural ingredients such as flour, yeast, water, and a bit of sugar or salt, meaning it will contribute a portion of the nitrogen needed in the composting process. Plus, there'll be a small portion of carbon as well in the burnt part.

Before adding the burnt toast to your compost, you might want to crumble it up a bit so that it will decompose more quickly or at least before it can get too moldy. Above all else, refrain from buttering the toast before composting it — actually, that's probably pretty obvious, right? If you just have an open compost pile rather than a covered bin, you might want to bury the toast a little so that rodents don't sniff it out and mess up your compost while looking for other delectable scraps.

Burnt toast can also be added to your worm compost in the same way you would throw in bits of bread. Once again, it's best if you crumble it up a bit, as this will make it easier for the worms to get through reasonably quickly. You might also want to dampen the toast a bit, and remember to bury it a little under the bedding to stop it from drying out. As long as you don't have a habit of burning your toast every morning, your worms will happily feed on a bit of charred bread every now and then. Just remember that too much bread will end up turning your worm farm acidic, so that's something you want to avoid. After all, keeping your worms happy means you'll have plenty of worm castings to help your garden thrive.