My son Michael had been composting food scraps for several years. I was starting to feel guilty for disposing of food scraps with a garbage disposal. I resolved to start composting.
On January 10, 2018, I ordered a rotating barrel composter from Lowe's.
When it arrived I began dumping all of our food scraps (except meat and dairy products) into it. I occasionally added dry leaves to the barrel and rotated the barrel to mix them with the food scraps.
I ordered a compost thermometer from Amazon. (Yes, this is really a thing! Amazon has a wide selection of them.)
Elevated temperature indicates that composting is happening. Unfortunately, this compost was consistently at the same temperature as the air. There was actually some composting action, but it was very slow.
On Sunday, January 13, 2019, I attended a composting workshop at The Sustainable Living Project in Tampa, and heard a very informative presentation by Josh Whiton, of MakeSoil.org. (He has a short version on YouTube .)
By this time, I had been collecting food scraps in the barrel for almost a year. The barrel was almost full, but the scraps did not seem to be composting very well. One thing I learned at the presentation was that composting will go much faster if you have a larger amount of material. The Sustainable Living Project had compost bins that were much larger than my barrel, as you can see in the picture below. That's Josh in the gray shirt at the left side.
So I decided to build a similar bin, using old pallets.
On March 12, 2019, the new compost bin was complete. I did a FaceBook Post about it:
"Compost bin project complete. Built primarily from old pallets picked up for free. Estimated build time: 4 hours. Actual build time: ~40 hours. Same as a typical software project."
A few days later I moved the contents of the rotating barrel composter to the new bin, and added some dry leaves.
From what I have read about composting, I need at least a cubic yard of material, and a pile at least 32 inches high, in order to get the heat generating effect required for rapid composting. (Two or three weeks vs. six months or a year.) Original paper: The Rapid Composting Method ) That would require the bin to be filled at least to the level of the top of the gate, on the left side of the bin in the picture above. The material from the barrel filled the bin only to about six or eight inches. I would need a lot more material in order to get rapid composting. I talked to Michael about moving some of his compost to my bin.
Michael agreed. And on March 31, we moved a load of his compost to my bin, about three or four house widths away.
Fortunately, I have two carts suitable for the job. We dumped some of his most mature compost directly into one the carts, and loaded a partially full barrel of it into the other.
And pulled the carts to my house.
We shoveled the compost into the bin, along with more dry leaves, and used a hoe to mix it up with the compost that was already there.
We added more dry leaves and stuck the compost thermometer into the pile.
This is still only about half as much material as I need in order to get the rapid composting effect. And as of April 1, the thermometer indicates that the pile is at the same temperature as the air.
