Lessons In Chemistry
In which Mike gets busy with a heaping dose of universal solvent and some sharp instruments.
22 Sep 2025
It is officially autumn. That's what the position of the sun says, that's what the calendar says. Soon the leaves will fall and that is the signal to complete the harvest, prune the trees and hunker down for the cold weather coming.
It is also time to manage compostable waste. We had an abundant crop of tomatoes this year and have kept a bowl of them on the counter for the past few months. Unfortunately there are more tomatoes than we can comfortably consume and many have gone by. It would be a shame to put them in the trash where they would eventually languish in some landfill far far away. Because of the rain, composting doesn't work well here so instead I render food scraps to a dry powder that can be turned into the soil to provide nutrients. The worms and Mother Nature do the rest of the work to make the powder into viable soil.
A few years back we purchased a gadget called a Food Cycler. Scraps are put in a bin and when it reaches capacity we run the machine. It dehydrates the scraps by grinding them in a hot environment. Once dry the heat stops and the churning continues rendering a course powder of organic matter. This has worked great for us until very recently.
My machine stalled over the weekend. Usually that happens when something overly fibrous gets in the mix and the machine can't chew it up and the fiber results in the motor stalling. Unfortunately, this particular batch was overfilled with grapes, tomatoes and egg shells. They dried alright, but instead of a powder, they formed a cement and froze the churning bar in its tracks. My guess is that the pectins in the fruits combined with the fibery bits and the calcium in the egg shell sealed the deal turning my kitchen waste into a rock.
I spent the weekend serially soaking the vessel in a water/vinegar solution and manually chipping away at the goo that formed from the cement. I still have a way to go, but the acid is slowly chewing up those calcium bits and I hope to be back in the food cycling business soon.
Keep on truckin'
-Mike
