Composting Research

Ok, for the last few weeks I have been doing a lot of reading on composters.  The soil here sucks and I watch how much food I throw in the trash with 2 kids.  My wife is a good liberal ;) and wants to save the earth, so I figure what the hell, lets compost.


Wow, who thought it could be so complicated.  Open compost piles are prone to attracting animals and mice and must be manually "turned".

Initially, I looked at barrel type tumblers, and instructions and videos on how to create them from salvaged barrels and such.  The problem with these type of composters is that once they are half full, they are very heavy to flip over as all the weight is at the bottom and must be almost completely inverted before the compost tumbles and shifts the weight.

Since I want two batches of compost going, a dual unit appeals to me.  I found this one really and thought it was the bomb till I realized two things.  It's huge AND because its metal, it has to be emptied every winter in freezing climates.

So, then I started looking at plastic models that do not have to be emptied (and do not have rust issues which can happen in metal versions). So I called the local garden shop and we went down to Moana nursery to look at this model.


It seemed a bit pricey when I realized that to really do composting right, you need two batches (so we would either need two, or I would need to put in a partition).  One that you are allowing to fully compost, and another location you can keep throwing your stuff in.  Some people put it in a deep freezer or other composting bin.  I figure, just put it in another tumbler.

We finally settled on the Envirocycle model shown here:


This is a smaller unit, and will allow us to put two of them in a small space as well as being (supposedly) easy to turn.

The best price that I can find is $139 at outdoordecor.com.  They have the best pricing on shipping as well.  So, we are going to get a couple of these and we will let you know how it goes from there.

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