Banana: How much is too much?

So you're a gardener. You have a compost pile, right? You're diligent about collecting kitchen scraps for the compost pile, even through the coldest part of winter. Coffee grounds, eggshells, tea bags, orange peels, apple cores, that half head of lettuce you left in the fridge too long and it started to turn -- none of this goes into the trash bin. It's all valuable and essential to the future health of your plants, so onto the compost pile it goes. What do you do when you produce a lot of kitchen scraps though? Like, banana peels maybe.

What if you have a couple of bunches worth of banana peels -- do they all go onto the pile? What if it's more than a couple of bunches worth... maybe 10 lbs of peels. Is that too much? What about 40 lbs?

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I don't know, but I'm going to find out soon.

You see, my wife is currently working at a bakery (well known for its St. Louis classic "gooey butter cake"). Early on she noticed that they often generate large amounts of kitchen scraps, so started bringing a bucket to work on "bread days".

Each week she brings home a bucket stuffed with peels. Sometimes she'll bring boxes of eggshells home too. This last week though she brought home the bucket, two "small" boxes and one BIG box full of banana skins, eggshells, zucchini peelings, and a single orange peel (somebody must have had a snack).

I'm going to estimate that this haul was around 40 lbs of organics. That's a lot of banana, especially since it's just the "take homes" from a single week.

I'm a little concerned about the Carbon to Nitrogen ratio ("greens" to "browns") of my pile, as it seems I might have much more Nitrogen (greens) than Carbon (browns). That will lead to a stinky pile. It currently smells surprisingly like bananas back here, but we'll see (or smell) once it warms up. How do you know how much Carbon or Nitrogen your pile materials contain? There are some references, but they're not entirely clear. Are banana peels "fruit waste" (high carbon to nitrogen ratio) or "vegetable scraps" (low C to N ratio)?

My gut feeling is I'll need more Carbon, so luckily I have some piles of dry leaves to mix in:

Hey, there's a potted bamboo in there I forgot about!

These have been protecting some of my bamboos -- will it be enough? No worries, as I'll soon have much, much more "browns" -- I'll be cutting down all of my ornamental grasses and putting them through the chipper. That's always a fun time!

My compost pile is already about 5' tall. Good thing I'm planning on building a compost bin soon, as it seems like I'll really need the room this year.

I'll worry about C to N ration later, but for now I'll just enjoy the aroma of ripe bananas as I work in the nearby veggie garden this weekend.

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