From Trash to Tomatoes: How Camp Stomping Ground Built a Compost System That Works
Imagine this.
Dinner wraps up, 200 campers and counselors line up for dessert, and the BIG TIME campers (our teen crew) plus the rover squad start tackling clean-up. The last job is taking out the trash.
It usually goes like this: two brave souls wrestle with 5 50-gallon cans of soggy, stinky, too-heavy bags, and hustle it across camp, praying they don't burst on the floor—or their feet. Then comes the heave-ho into the dumpster. Not exactly anyone’s favorite camp memory.
But this summer, things changed.
We successfully implemented a robust compost system—and it’s one of the projects I’m most proud of from this season.
Tyler + Dirt = Magic
Enter Tyler—our new Farm Director, numbers guy, landscape guru, upset-kid whisperer, and, honestly, one of the best listeners at camp. One thing to know about Tyler is he is obsessed with dirt (which he would gently correct is soil… not dirt).
Last summer, he and some campers tried to build a compost system from pallets—the kind you see on Pinterest. It worked for a minute, but the sheer volume of food waste at camp made it unsustainable.
This year, Tyler leveled up. He wanted concrete blocks. And who comes through but our camp guardian angel, John Munter Sr. John called up Palette Stone Yard and asked about “mafia blocks”—those massive, two-ton concrete blocks you can stack like Legos. Thanks to John’s connections, we got a great deal and free delivery.
With JM’s muscle and Tyler’s vision, they stacked the blocks into three bays. Now, the tractor can easily turn over the piles, brown matter is layered in, and our food waste has a new destiny.
The Science of Compost
I had to grab Tyler for this part… Here’s what he had to say about it:
Compost isn’t just old food—it’s alive. When old food rots in an oxygen deprived environment (like the landfill) it produces methane. That’s why it’s so smelly and no good for the atmosphere. But when it’s combined with carbonaceous materials (like dried leaves) to create pockets of oxygen, and it gets the right amount of water, that is the recipe for life. Microbial life moves in – they move around, eat, reproduce (you know, life stuff) and all of that activity heats the pile to over 140°F. This is what creates that dark forest-like soil we call compost. It’s estimated that about 1 to 10 billion microbes live in 1 gram of active compost. That’s a single handful! The real heroes are those trillions of microbes eating our leftover lasagna. I have this giant thermometer stuck in the pile that I loved checking with the campers and telling them about this process (mostly because they are just as mindblown as I am).
It became an unexpected educational opportunity. Staff and campers learned not just about decomposition, but about patience, cycles, and transformation—powerful metaphors for the work we do at camp.
How Much Waste Did We Compost?
Let’s do some quick math:
3 meals a day → ~5 buckets (5 gallons each) of food waste per meal
15 buckets per day → ~20 pounds per bucket
300 pounds per day → 9 weeks of camp → 63 days
That’s over 18,000 pounds of food waste composted this summer!
Instead of rotting in a landfill, all that waste is now becoming rich soil to feed our future gardens.
From Compost to Chapel
So where’s all this compost headed? Straight into the ground at camp.
This summer, Tyler gave us a preview. He turned a roadside-find carport into a makeshift greenhouse, filled it with cucumbers, peppers, and—mostly—tomatoes. Hundreds of them. Golden, red,orange, and purple tomatoes, sweet as candy, alongside giant beefsteaks.
Tyler used a method called “lower and lean”: tomato vines are attached to the roof with twine spooled around hooks. As the lower sections stop producing, he lowers the string and prunes the trusses and leaves off—giving the vine room to keep growing and fruiting.
Walking into that greenhouse feels like entering a chapel. Kids and staff alike were quiet as they wandered through the rows, reverent, picking and eating tomatoes straight off the vine.
Sustainability in Every Sense
We plan to keep investing in food production at camp—not just for the delicious harvests, but for the lessons in growth, patience, and resilience.
Anyone who knows me knows I’m not exactly famous for patience. I’m fast-paced, sometimes anxious, and often overwhelmed by the intricacies of running a growing nonprofit. Tyler’s steadiness—the same steadiness it takes to grow perfect tomatoes—isn’t just saving our food scraps. It’s also helping sustain me, our staff, and the bigger vision of Camp Stomping Ground.
So yes, we built a compost system. But more than that, we built a way to turn waste into growth, mess into beauty, and chaos into nourishment. That is camp.
Laura Kriegel, MSW is the founder and Executive Director of Stomping Ground. Laura embodies what it is like to lead a team and business while still nourishing your inner child. She loves painting, being silly, and walking Wendy around the perimeter of camp every day.
Connect with Laura : laura@campstompingground.org
