I’ve been cultivating our kitchen garden in France since 2013. This will be our third year. It will be the first year that it will be properly composted as I finally found a local compost mountain not so far away from us. Hooray!

I was googeling around again this year to see if I could find a local outlet for compost. I haven’t had any success in my search previous years. I wasn’t sure if I was using the right search words or whether I asked the right people to refer me to a source. Nothing was moving me into the right direction. This year is different, luck is on my side apparently. In my search I ended up here. With the information provided there, I found this blog, which brought me here. I finally found a mountain with black gold!

If you are also keeping up a vegetable garden, you can imagine my happiness. I’m sharing my find here for those of you that are also new to the Grenoble area and are trying to find the same pile of black gold. There is enough to share.

Without giving it much thought we decided to visit this Centre de compostage in La Buisse (on the road towards Voiron, when coming from Grenoble) over the weekend. In high season (gardening season) the centre is open for private individuals on Saturdays as well. Very convenient.

We had no clue how things were going to work when arriving there. We read that we could also buy the compost in bags, and we therefore decided just to visit the place without any preparations. Arriving there, we realised that there was a proper way of collecting your compost. We saw that basically everybody came to collect the compost by car with an attached trailer. The available tractor just dumped a ‘spoon’ full of the required steaming hot dirt on top. Very convenient, again.

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Less fortunate and not so convenient for us though. I wanted to collect compost made from kitchen leftovers, not the leaf compost. The only compost that was offered in bags, was the leaf compost though. And unlike all the French people, we don’t own a car with a towing hook. Next to that neither of us has a driving license that allows us to drive with a trailer (we think). It became apparent that we had to collect the dirt in a non conventional (and not so environment friendly way). The guy that worked there, was very friendly though and just explained how we could collect the compost with shovels they offered.

We had a garbage bags roll lying in our car and we used those to collect the compost. Easy peasy. Within no time we had filled twenty bags with compost, and decided that it was probably going to be enough for this growth year. We collected about 400L and paid about 10EUR for it. We got a discount as we collected it ourselves. Perfect! We had the idea that people living in the Voiron region could pick the compost up for free, as it’s made from green garbage that was collected from their households. We were not totally sure though. Sounds like a good community service though!

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Yet another great discovery for us in our area. We will probably visit this place again and not only to get more compost. They also offer for example very affordable mulch for the vegetable garden. We saw straw piled up on the back side of the area. This area is – what we in the Netherlands call – the ‘environment’ street of the Voiron region. That means that you can get rid of your old stuff here as well, and next to that they have a big space where you can buy new second hand stuff. Definitely something that we will keep in mind for a next time.

More information:
Site Écologique de La Buisse
Price list