Where the pomace goes: two growers, one compost loop

The other output ¶

A press makes two things. One goes in a bottle and one sits in the basket, and the second is heavier than most people expect — depending on the fruit, the cake can weigh as much as the juice we extracted.

For the first season ours went into the municipal stream, which is legal, straightforward, and slightly absurd given where it came from.

The arrangement ¶

Two of our six growers compost at scale. One takes citrus cake, which is acidic and slow to break down and needs mixing with woody material. The other takes pear cake, which is wetter and faster.

They collect when they deliver — the crates go one way, the buckets come back the other. No extra journey, which is the only reason it is worth doing at all. An arrangement that required a dedicated van would be worse than the landfill it replaced.

What we had to change ¶

Separating citrus cake from pear cake means not pressing them back to back into the same basket, which changes the running order of a shift. In practice we now do all the citrus in one block and all the pome fruit in another.

We also had to stop using the compostable-looking bin liners we started with. The growers asked us to. Most of them do not break down at composting temperature and they turn up as shreds a year later.

Numbers, with a caveat ¶

Across a typical week the two growers take the large majority of what we press. The remainder — seeds picked out, and anything from a lot we were unsure about — still goes to municipal collection.

I am not going to publish a percentage, because we weigh irregularly and any figure I gave you would be an estimate dressed up as a measurement. If we start weighing every bucket, I will publish it then.

Why it is not a sustainability programme ¶

This is two phone calls and a set of buckets. It works because we are small, because the growers were already composting, and because the vehicle was going to make the journey anyway.

It would not survive us doubling in size, and I have no plan for what happens if it does. Calling it a loop is accurate; calling it a strategy would not be.

If you press at home ¶

Domestic pomace composts fine in a normal garden bin, provided you balance it with dry material — citrus especially. It is wet and acidic and will go sour on its own.

The seeds are the part people forget. Pear and apple seeds survive most home compost and will happily sprout in a bed the following spring, which is either a problem or a free tree depending on your temperament.