Pumpkins can also be recycled in street garden garbage carts without bags, even in areas of Ventura County where residents are required to bag their food waste.
In Thousand Oaks and Santa Paula, where Athens Services provides garbage services, residents put all food into the garden garbage carts anyway, without bags.
But in other parts of the county where Harrison Industries or WM (formerly known as Waste Management) provide curbside collection services, ignoring the bag may feel like breaking the rules. not.
Typically, most Ventura County homes keep food and garden clippings separate so that the local composting facility doesn’t violate permit requirements. In two years, the Agromin-operated site at his Limoneira Farm near Santa Paula will have the facility ready to accept and compost food waste along with garden cuttings.
On the other hand, if the compost pile contains large amounts of food, the facility could face regulatory penalties. But according to Sean DeVry, manager of the Ventura County Department of Environmental Health, regulators now exclude whole or diced pumpkins from being considered food waste.
Today, bags of food collected by companies affiliated with Harrison Industries are separated from garden clippings at the Gold Coast Recycling and Transfer Station in Ventura. Food bags collected in the cities of Oxnard and Port Hueneme are pulled from a conveyor belt at the Del Norte Regional Recycling and Transfer Station in Oxnard.
Bags of food that WM collects in garden clippings are pulled and processed by Agromin at the Simi Valley Landfill and Recycling Center. In either case, until local facilities are permitted to handle the food, the food is separated from the yard clippings into bags, then separated from the bags at the Simi Valley landfill and sent out of the county for composting. It must be transported by truck.
It might have been more practical to wait for the local food composting facility to be permitted, but state mandates could not afford a delay.
California Senate Bill 1383, passed in 2016, required all cities and counties to implement various programs to convert organic matter. That included collecting food waste from households.
The primary objective of this law is to reduce climate-causing emissions by reducing the amount of spoilage in landfills. Other possible benefits of resulting composting include recycling of soil nutrients, water conservation, business development, agriculture and garden improvement, and reduction of pesticide and fertilizer pollution.
Garden cuttings and food waste collection, trucking, and disposal create other types of pollution, so some people choose home composting instead. If you put it in, you will also get the benefits of gardening. You can fortify your own soil and benefit your own garden with the resulting compost.
But pumpkins have a lot of seeds. Operators of commercial composting facilities keep their compost piles at temperatures above 130 degrees for several days, preventing the seeds from sprouting in the finished compost, so it’s no problem if the garden waste cart contains pumpkin seeds. There is none.
If you plan to compost your pumpkin at home, it may be better to scoop out the seeds first. You can roast the seeds for a delicious snack. Or, if you want pumpkins next year his October, dry this year’s seeds and plant them in June and he in July. It takes 90 to 120 days for most pumpkins to reach full maturity.
As the pumpkin grows, it creates a vine, sometimes up to 20 feet long, that requires little water. Each plant typically produces 2-5 pumpkins, so there may be enough pumpkins recycled the following year.
Of course, the pumpkin recycling tips above don’t apply to artisanal pumpkin decorators who use artificial items that are prohibited in the official Jack o’Lantern contest. , glued-on beads, studs and rivets are not welcome in garden waste recycling carts or home compost bins.
Ditch those extreme creations. No one wants the glow of Halloween pumpkins contaminating the compost of the flower bed in the spring.
You can contact David Goldstein, Environmental Resources Analyst for the Ventura County Public Works Agency at 805-658-4312 or david.goldstein@ventura.org.
