Sunday, July 02, 2006

Compost bins


These are my compost bins. The resident carpenter built them for me many years ago. Two side-by-side units with removable fronts. Each year I empty one two-year aged bin-full of compost into the garden. I turn the one-year-old contents of the other bin over into the empty bin so the half-done compost gets mixed and turned over. They work great. This year some potatoes I threw into the front bin are growing a garden of their own. I wonder if I will get new potatoes from them?

Solanum tuberosum
my bins and systems for composting compost

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Love your site - have you every heard of blending scraps from the kitchen and then incorporating them into the soil around your plants? Read this in a magazine and would love to read your thoughts about it.

kathy said...

Do you mean uncomposted? I haven't heard of this. My problem with kitchen scraps is that they are messy to collect and require me to walk out to the bins every day. I think it would be even more work to process them and put then into the garden regularly.

I try to put in as many kitchen scraps into my compost bins as I can. Any unused vegetable material can go in: peels, eggshells, rinds, old veggies, coffee grounds. My parents are really good at doing this and end up with a nice rich compost. I just find it to be alot of work. And I get plenty of garden waste, alot more than I can use, so I don't usually put too much effort into collecting the kitchen scraps.

marconychair said...

i was wondering if you have ever had a mice problem with this kind of wooden compost bin?

kathy said...

No. I never have seen any mice or evidence of mice around the bins. But then, there are so many cats in our neighborhood. The squirrels sometimes take the compost (apple cores or corn cobs) and move them around the yard. That's the only "problem". Its pretty minor.