The compost is ready when it looks and feels like soft moist dirt, ie it should be uniform and ‘fine’ – no chunkies. And it should not smell bad! If you only have one bin then at some point you’ll have to stop adding to it, to let it finish doing its thing. That’s why many people use the multi-bin system, so you can always be adding to one while he other is ‘cooking’. Does that make sense?

Another fun ‘recycling’ project is toilet paper roll seed pots

Cheers!

Also! My aunt and uncle have a small trash bin they use for food scraps before they stick it in the compost, but it attracts fruit flies, which can be kinda pesky. So how about putting a bin in your freezer and sticking the scraps in there until you can make a run? It’s especially helpful if your bin is a bit further away then you’d like.

The other real solution I’ve heard of for apartment dwellers, is a worm bin. It’s debatably vegan, but apparently they’ll live happily in a big bucket underneath a kitchen cabinet or some other out-of-the-way place. You ‘feed them’ your kitchen scraps and they turn it into amazing soil. Totally self contained. You could then use it to fertilize your house plants/windowsill veggies.

It’s called vermicompost, and here’s the Wikipedia article on it.

luck!