Compost

You never know when you might run into a blog reader.  Yesterday my son had a soccer game and as I was settling into my chair, a mom I knew came over to chat with me. Her son used to go to school with Brian but has switched schools and his soccer game was in the time slot before Brian's.  Sue reads my blog and was very kind in telling me how much she enjoys it and in her next breath asked me about compost.  So I said I would write a post about the different compost methods.

I use the lazy method which is primarily layer all the stuff, layer some more, turn a little and a year later, take out and spread.

This is my composter (it's called a pyramid composter).  I bought it years ago at Gardener's Supply (my favorite gardening shop).  You lift up the lid and throw your stuff in.  I put in there my kitchen scraps, leaves, torn up junk mail and primarily all the prunings from the yard.  I just throw them in, push them down, throw in more stuff and once the weather gets warmer I poke holes in the pile  Around August, I will empty out the bins and then spread the compost around my plants in the yard.  Pretty easy, not much work.

This is the drum composter that is in my community garden.  The way this type works is you fill it with your stuff and then at some point you stop putting anything in it.  You then spend a couple of weeks turning it and supposedly compost will be made.  The problem is you are still accumulating kitchen scraps while you're waiting for your compost to be made.  I think the optimal method would be to have one of these plus a pyramid composter.  So you can continue to pile your kitchen scraps into the pyramid composter while making your compost in the drum contraption.  We use this in our community garden along with bin composting.

This is the bin system in our community garden.  A group of gardeners collected pallets from the local nursery and then built 6 bins.  The first two you put the raw material (garden detris), then once that breaks down, move to the next two bins and then when it's mostly broken down, move to the last two bins.  By moving everything once in while, it gets turned.  Right now there is quite a bit of compost ready but it needs to be sifted.  A couple of gardeners have sifters so I think the plan is on the garden work day in Nov, it will be done.

Lastly, I've been talking for years about getting a worm composter - something like this

Then I can feed it my kitchen scraps and have worms in my house!  I'm hoping to finally get a system this winter - it's just a matter of figuring out where to put it in my basement.