Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Compost

I gave in to my compost woes and bought myself a compost bin from Cheap as Chips. I listened to all the "experts" that say you don't need to go and buy yourself some fancy bin in order to make compost successfully. But having tried our own "homemade" version for a while now with limited success, I felt the $25 investment was worth it.

It's a fairly simple set up. A metal frame with a heavy duty plastic bag style liner. You put the stuff in the top and it has a little trap door at the bottom where you can remove the compost when it's ready.



I'm not sure how long it will last but for $25, I decided it was worth a go. If nothing else, it will help me decide whether it's worthwhile investing in a commercial compost bin (as opposed to our homemade efforts).

It fits between my 2 garden beds which is perfect for adding waste from the garden and not far to walk from the kitchen either. With chooks, we don't have a lot of waste for composting but I plan to do a big "shred-up" soon with some paper from the office and that can go in there as well.

Yesterday, when I lifted the lid, it had a real "sweet" aroma to it. PERFECT!!!! I'm pretty sure that's what compost is supposed to smell like so I was pretty excited by that. :-)

It's only a small start toward my eventual goal of producing all our own compost on site but at least it's a step in the right direction.

3 comments:

River said...

I made compost one year quite by accident. i raked all the fallen leaves into a huge pile and then forgot about them while I stayed inside because it was raining forever. This was a few years ago, obviously. The leaves rotted down nicely, so I added my veg peelings, a few weeds, a little cow manure, left it for a few more weeks, then shovelled it all under the peach tree that was in that yard.

lightening said...

That's the best kind of compost - the kind where you don't even have to try. :)

Unknown said...

Yeah that's really great thing about your compost bin from Cheap. I really appreciate. That's really too good. Thanks for sharing.
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