Posts Tagged ‘composting’
Let’s Recycle Organic Waste-Kitchen Compost and Garden Compost Together in a Composting Bin
The composting bin you decide on can be simple and cheap, to high-end style and not so cheap. It really depends on your preferences, your space requirements, and your budget. You are putting your compost pile, that ragged pile that takes a long time to decompose, into a compost container so it is not so ragged and long term in decomposition. You are helping nature along by closing in your compost and you don’t have to wait as long for your nutritious compost soil.
When aerated, kept moist, and covered, your compost is breaking down (decomposing) at about 140°-160° Fahrenheit. You have to turn it or stir it up every one or two weeks. Outside of that, there is really nothing to do. In 60- 90 days you have nutritious compost to add to your flower beds and gardens, or potted plants, or new plantings, or…….
Homemade Compost Bins
Four 5′ metal stakes, some snow fencing, and some heavy wire for attachment and with a tarp cover, you have a compost bin. Looks like crap but it certainly will get the job done.
I go down to the mower place when they get a shipment of riding lawnmowers on pallets. The guy gives me as many as I can carry away. Here I build a compost bin using 8 foot metal stakes and build the walls, top, and bottom out of the pallets. Looks neat and with good aeration, and keeping it moist, it works very well.
Now, some folks will tell you not to use untreated wood because it will also decompose. I figure “So What!”, I’ll just go down to the mower place and get another one. Isn’t that what recycling is all about? “Dust to Dust”……. and all that.
Composting Barrels
In that same recycling theme, you can use metal or plastic barrels. I particularly like those blue surplus 55 gal. plastic barrels that I get from the city and last year I got the surplus(read ugly) trash barrels from the beach authority. Cleaned up with a bunch of drilled holes and a secure lid and bingo we’ve got a compost bin.
I turn my compost weekly by simply rolling the barrel to another location in the yard. You can build a compost tumbler if you stick a steel rod through the barrel and put the ends on some sort of stanchion to create your own compost tumbler making it easier to rotate the barrel and turn your working compost. Not as much fun for the kids as rolling a barrel around the yard but if you are the only one participating in the deal a crank will be easier and quicker.
Worm Bins
When you first discover worm composting it may put you off a bit but really, get over it. They have tried softening the name to vermicomposting but “vermi” is simply latin for worm. We are not just talking any worm here but “red wiggler” worms. These redworms (Eisenia foetida) are not soil dwellers but organic waste pile residents. They make the best compost for your gardens flat out.
Since this whole exercise is to keep my new pets happy I’ll make a worm farm or at least something similar. I go to the local wine shop and liberate some of their multi-bottle wooden boxes. They are usually not finished or treated wood which is good for my worms. I find a couple that are 8 inches high and about 16×16 inches length and width. I now drill lots of 3/16th inch holes in the bottom and the lid. I’ve found some side vented plastic trays at a local nursery that have a 16×16 inch nesting ridge leaving the bottom of my box 4 inches from the bottom. This is for some really wonderful compost tea.
Add your moist bedding, a little soil or fine sand, chopped up kitchen compost materials, and your redworms and you are good to go.
There you go, all types of inexpensive composting containers you can use to build a compost system for your home. More composting ideas to help you go green and benefit.
There seems to be two major types of people I meet most often that enjoy composting.
There are the environmentalists, the “green folks”. They find composting fits with their ideals and philosophies. You know, all natural, organic, and nutritional. Not a bad motivation at all, don’t you think?
The second group are the successful organic gardeners. Lawns, flowerbeds, and that little plot of tomatoes, squash, herbs,…… the ones you like getting an invite to their barbecue next Saturday.
There is another smaller group that I fit into. Let’s call it the thrifty bunch. More bluntly it is the lazy and cheap folks that want a real benefit from their “environmental correctness”. Bottom line stuff.
Get Ready, Get Set, Get Composting!!
My first foray into composting was because I just hated hauling out bagged yard waste to the street for pick-up. You know, you have to keep bagging those grass clippings. Stop the mower, detach the bag, dump it in the plastic bag in the garbage can, reattach the catch bag, start the mower again (if it isn’t to hot), and do it all over again and again. Same thing with cutting back the landscape plants around the mansion. Bag it and haul it out to be picked up.
Well, I read a short article on composting yard waste so I started to build a compost pile. It was just an empty piece of property on the side of the garage and I dumped the twigs, grass clippings, leaves (oh, do we have leaves), flower bed trimmings and picked weeds, into a heap and called it a compost pile.
It was well over a year before this stuff decomposed enough just to be called mulch, at least at the bottom of the pile. It turned out to be pretty good organic mulch and I kept this compost heap going by just piling it on without anything else. Told you I was lazy!!
As an aside, this heap was started several years ago. I have become more sophisticated in my composting efforts over the years but I kept my compost pile going. Last year I needed the space for some other things and decided to clear the pile. I had three friends with shovels and wheel barrows show up for the bottom of the compost pile. This was good nutritional soil with it’s own worms and rich smell and hey, they are friends.
Next Step -Building a Compost Bin
I’ve learned that I can speed up nature by putting all this stuff in an aerated compost container or compost bin. I learned how to build a compost bin (used pallets and steel rods). It worked great. Keeping it moist, aerated, and turned I had a bunch of rich dark compost to add to my little piece of heaven.
Since that first bin I have used 55 gal. barrels, bought large plastic bins, used compost tumblers that made it easier to turn and aerate the working compost, and cute little pillow-like composters that you roll around in the yard (the kids loved it). They all make great compost with minimal effort.
Vermicompost (Worm Compost)
I have also gotten into worm compost. I know, a bit over the top but it makes the most nutritious and richest soil available. A little weird but wow, what results. Your flower beds and vegetable gardens will yield the most flavorful tomatoes and other vegetables and the healthiest flowers and fruit to be found. And there are extra benefits – think fishing. Again, you can make your own or buy some worm compost bins. Small footprint and very little odor allows this to be done inside or out.
Composting Kitchen Scraps
I am the household cook. If you want something done right………(I was professionally trained). In the kitchen I have a nice compost pail with lid right next to the garbage can.
It is amazing how fast this compost bucket, compost pail, or crock (whichever you call it) fills up with coffee grounds and filters, banana peels, peach skin peels, potato peels, carrot peels, broccoli stalks, green bean ends, wilted lettuce leaves and cores, washed egg shells, pineapple cores, tomato ends, tea bags and any other vegetable scraps off the cutting board or getting brown in the back of the refrigerator. (Oh, right! It doesn’t happen to you)
What Goes Where for Recycling
The garbage can only gets meat, fish, and dairy scraps, plastic packaging, styrofoam, and grease.
The recycling bin (it’s the law here) gets the glass, metal, plastic covered paper, and all the plastic.
Newspapers and unbleached paper and cardboard gets shredded and included as bedding for all the compost piles I have going.
Benefits of Composting
Well, like I said, it is easy ’cause I’m lazy. It’s cheap to do, if you know how.
The paybacks and benefits of composting are both environmental and economic.
Environmental not just as “going green”, but the real meaning of recycling. Your own little biosphere if you will. Your new soil will produce healthy, pest free plants with the nutrient rich compost you’ve created from “stuff we have”.
Economic benefits of composting come from savings on fertilizer, insecticide, soil boosters, dying plants, and that time wasted out in the yard without results. And you don’t have to haul all those bags out to the street.
There is one other benefit of composting we really shouldn’t talk about. It’s that sin of “pride”. I live in a neighborhood. I live on a sandspit called Florida. I am 600 yards to the Atlantic Ocean.
I have limited wars with insects, weeds are not quite as pervasive on my little plot, everything is blooming or green and healthy, and the whole street wants to know my secret.
Sorry guys, no secret. Just composting. Hey, it’s easy!