The garbage can isn?t as useful to Nancy Frick.
Frick, of Westminster, throws her food scraps ? orange peels, cabbage, coffee grinds and even coffee filters ? into a green ceramic jar about a foot tall next to her kitchen sink. It?s the first step in composting ? creating her own fertilizer while recycling what would otherwise be dumped in a landfill.
“It isn?t really a nasty mess because it?s going to be pure gold when we?re finished,” said Frick, a University of Maryland-certified master gardener. “Now see, you don?t see flies or fruit flies or anything like that.”
She?s one of about 80 master gardeners in Carroll County, certified after she paid for about 50 hours of training from Maryland professionals.
Her mission is to teach others in her community how to be green, but in Carroll, no one seems interested.
Maryanne Turner, a master gardener from Taneytown, said she wants to travel to people?s homes to teach composting, but her attempts to start classes at libraries have been discouraging because no one showed up.
So she?s turned to the county government in the hope it could give residents “that extra push” to recycle and compost.
Turner, Frick and Westminster resident Rebekah Orenstein last week explained to county commissioners how to compost and how they could set an example for constituents by becoming more green.
Orenstein recently began composting as a way to protest a proposed waste-to-energy incinerator, which would burn 1,500 tons of garbage each day from Frederick and Carroll counties.
Incinerator critics, including the commissioner-appointed Environmental Advisory Panel, have urged the county to start promoting mass compost and increase recycling.
The county?s recycling rate is one of the worst in the state, but Frick said residents may not learn unless they?re forced ?or unless it hits their wallets.
She said she never buys fertilizer, but uses the compost she makes to enrich several gardens around her house.
In addition, her house is Baywise-certified. Buckets collect runoff from her rainspouts so she can water her plantsas the county looks to clamp down on sprinklers and hoses this summer with voluntary water restrictions.
