Composting

I’ve never composted before, so this last year is the first time for me. What really worked for me was these black plastic bins from Amazon. (None of these are affiliate links. I get paid nothing if you buy anything. I just like ’em. ) I just wait until they are under $80 on sale. I hate paying full price!

They provide that green compost turner hanging on the back wall, but it’s not good. It took too much yanking on my bad collarbone joint to work well.

Instead I got an overpriced spiral version on Amazon. I guess I am getting old because I resent spending $50 on basically a chunk of spiral metal. It works though. Really well, so I guess it’s worth the money.

This is far easier on my bad joints. I can twist it in, and yank it back out easily, turning the compost. Now I can do it when I want, not when my joints are good enough to do it. That’s a nice change.

I literally only turn it about once a week, when I take my table scraps out. I’m just not that dedicated. I do use my big paper shredder to shred Amazon boxes to mix in. I just don’t have browns at all if I don’t use paper and amazon boxes. The shredder was about $250, and says it won’t do cardboard, but I have been doing great with it. I am pretty impressed that I can compost like 75% of all my own cardboard. I still get overwhelmed with it, but it feels good to not dispose of so much.

I didn’t do any fancy compost calculations. I just tossed in about roughly 50% browns and 50% greens. I didn’t expect it to work so well due to my laziness, but I was wrong.

Today was the best part. I turned my compost, and it was filled with happy worms.

I am super excited about that. When spring comes I think it will be ready to spread on my beds. I won’t have to pay for Lowe’s compost!

I have also learned that what I think will be a lot, really isn’t. The bin was filled to the very tip top in October, and now it’s broken down to so little. I had dumped some of my greens into the yard waste bin for the city to pick up, but now that I know how much it breaks down, I am not doing that again. I need that for my garden!

I bought a second one, and placed it in the corner of the yard. When the first one is done, I will move it over next to the corner one. I think I need a third now that I know what I am doing. I need enough room to fill like two of them, and let one of them just age. I think they will look nice there all in a row.

As an aside, you can also see the clover coming in around the grass clumps. The entire yard is like that. It started as a garbage dump of trash dirt and clumps of dying scrub grass, but the clover seems very hardy. I hope by year two, it will have spread all over.

My next plan is the garden cage. I need to cover it with squirrel proof hardware cloth. My Squirrel Interdiction Cage failed spectacularly. None of my overwinter ideas are going to happen because the squirrels dug up literally everything. Including the rhubarb! Lesson learned! Squirrels can fit through chicken wire!

I am going to see about starting that process in February, when I have a little more light to work by. It’s getting dark before 5pm, and after work I just don’t have enough. When I do have a day off, it’s full of rain and I am not doing it in the rain.

When I start I will keep posting about my progress, though.