Compost heaps-the ideal.

[Trailoftears]

Never mind the rats nest aka the covid 19 thread-lets get REALLY controversial here-how do you do yours-turn/not turn merchant?Ideal size?no.of bins?

Grass in/noway?

Bring it on....

[Stere]

Ideal would be concrete side panels on a pad with  say 6 bays and turn with  a front loader i suppose.

 

Atm mine are brick like this and use pitchfork & everything goes in but could be abit bigger & more bays and turning manually is a pita.

 

 

Bay size 6ft cube smaller ones don't work as well as normally corners seem to be last to compost also can't swing a pitchfork as well etc...

 

Edited March 19 by Stere

[sime42]

I take the lazy approach at the moment. Three of those plastic Dalek type bins, filled and emptied in rotation. Probably a two year cycle. I don't bother to turn it, as I can't due to the size, but it turns out as nice, well rotted compost at the end. Everything goes in there: some garden waste and all kitchen veggie waste, (including orange peel - I've seen advice that you shouldn't include it but never understood why). No grass cuttings though. I cut the lawn as rately as possible so it tends to be seeding when I do.

 

Ideally I'd have have concrete bays as well.

 

 

[nepia]

Daleks work well in the sun.  Got five of them and try to rotate but find I fill them all so occasionally tip one out, mix it up and re-load it.

Obvs this is in a garden, nothing commercial scale.

 

Yes, yes, yes to a moderate amount of grass clippings - they're what make your heat

[sime42]

Yeah, I think that's a bit positive for the plastic bins - they heat up nicely. Getting towards Hot Composting maybe. Obviously not that hot though as there's always masses of writhing Tiger Worms whenever we open the lid on the WIP one.

 

 

[jimboy]

I have the plastic Blackwall composter which the council gave out free years ago. Best result I had was when i had eight cans of well expired Guiness and poured some onto the compost heap. Checked some time later and the red brambling worms were sitting waiting or more drink and fresh material. Compost that year was great.

Previous to getting a composter bin, and in my first house, the garden was overgrown, so hacked everything back and skimmed weeds to leave bare soil. The ground was solid, so I visited nearby stables and got a dozen bags of fresh horse manure. Placed the manure in a pile n the middle of the garden in full sun, and covered it with plastic sheeting. Overnight steam started coming out of a hole in tine plastic like a mini volcano and after a fortnight the pile of manure was a third of its original size. Moved the manure aside and the ground underneath was full of lovely worms and really friable and easy to dig over. Got more manure and did the same to the rest of the garden and saved myself the backache of trying to smash the ground with a mattock.

These days I compost woodchip with a plastic sheet in a similar fashion and top dress the flower beds in the autumn. Works really well.

[peds]

42 minutes ago, jimboy said:

I have the plastic Blackwall composter which the council gave out free years ago. Best result I had was when i had eight cans of well expired Guiness and poured some onto the compost heap. Checked some time later and the red brambling worms were sitting waiting or more drink and fresh material. Compost that year was great.

 

I expect the minimal amount of alcohol you added didn't help anything, but there's a hell of a lot of easily-digestible calories in beer that would fuel all sorts of bacterial and fungal colonists. That would definitely liven things up a little. 

 

On that note, it's a good habit to not salt your pasta/potato/rice cooking water and throw that on your pile after it's been drained and cooled, unless you are using it in soup or sauce, or using the absorption method. Lots of precious starch going to waste if it goes down the drain. 

 

 

[Steven P]

Me, it is just a tidy heap that is turned over a couple of times a year - everything goes, plus some saw dust to give it the 'brown' to work against the 'greens'. Edges of the heap are a few scaffold boards with gaps between them.

 

About once a year I dig it all out and sift out the fine stuff into an old wheelie bin for potting / as a slugs nest and the big stuff - sticks and so on, goes back in. I'm finding doing this all the stones and rubbish ends up at the bottom of the pile (it keeps getting returned, is the last to be dug out / first to be returned) rather than in the compost itself.

[Paul in the woods]

In an ideal world I'd like several large bays I could pile up loads of material in, something that would get hot enough to dispose of a body or two...

 

At the moment I make do with I think about 8 daleks, and happily put all my grass cuttings in them along with other waste without problems, although much of the grass is long so more like mulched straw.

 

My main problem is getting enough material as we have quite poor soil so need more compost than we can make.

[Botty Cough]

My garden is so huge I have two compost wheelie bins that I pay to get emptied.

If I composted I'd soon have such a big pile I don't think I'd be able to deal with it.

Along with burning to keep waste to a minimum I don't really see the point of composting really.

Too much effort for not a lot and the dog digs it up to boot.

Soil is good so I just mix in peat for the holes I dig for planting.