It's been too hot this week to do little more than splash some extra water on plants in the early morning hours before taking cover in the air conditioned house for the rest of the day. A very slow cooling of temperatures is expected over the next several days but, in the meantime, I'm not tackling any new projects. My only goal at present is to prevent what I can from dying.
However, I got a new toy last week I thought I'd share. Its purpose is to help me make compost. My new compost bins were put in service in April, replacing the compost tumbler that came with the property when we moved here in December 2010.
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| My husband built these bins using junk we had on hand which would otherwise have gone into the trash |
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| The tumbler we inherited slowly disintegrated until it was no longer serviceable. We tossed what remained into the construction dumpster during our remodel last year. |
I've been careful about what I put in my new bin but I discovered nonetheless that the material compacts fairly quickly, making it difficult to aerate, and regular aeration is key to decomposition. Cranking the old tumbler wasn't easy as it filled up but it was effective. When my new bin was half full I decided to turn over the contents by moving it from one bin to the other using a pitchfork. That was awkward, time-consuming and exhausting. So I went online to look for something that could help. I settled on the Compost Crank made from recycled materials in Tucson, Arizona by a company appropriately called LoTech Products.
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| This is the crank |
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| It came with a tag including very simple instructions |
And it worked just fine.
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| Shot of the bin before aeration |
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| The crank is turned clockwise, then lifted. I repeated this action a dozen times in different sections of the bin. |
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| This is what it looked like afterwards |
In retrospect I made a couple poor decisions when deciding what to include in the bin. Most compost recipes call for two to three parts brown (high carbon) materials to every one part green (high nitrogen) materials. I don't layer these materials as some experts suggest but I did try to keep the proportions of carbon and nitrogen materials as balanced as possible. This led me to add things like paper bags and coconut fiber basket liners to my mix both which degrade slowly. These additions might have been fine if I'd shredded the material to a greater extent than I did before tossing it into the bin. Still, I've had no problems with odor or animals.
Composting isn't fast but, no matter what you do, it happens eventually; however, my goal is to keep the process moving as quickly as possible. Do you compost? Are there any tricks you'd care to share?
Note: I purchased the Compost Crank on my own and have no relationship or association with the company that sold it.
All material © 2012-2020 by Kris Peterson for Late to the Garden Party