We've been composting for years. I have a plastic bucket under my sink that everything goes into. Coffee grounds, peelings etc... We build ours with wooden pallets. I can get as many as I want for free at work. Sometimes we can pick up some manure (cow and/or horse) and we will throw that in a bin all by itself and let it sit for a year or two. I don't use (waste) it in my flower beds, but use it mostly for the veggie garden, usually for side dressing the plants as they grow. We also try to be as organic as possible, using organic pesticides and the like. Such as NEEM and BT. Chemical free is the way to go.

Cathy

I got started on GW with the soil forum and learned so much!

We compost everything we can, I even have a friend that saves her kitchen scraps for me. I have two bins framed with cinder blocks. We can make several finished piles each summer by using grass clippings + saved shredded leaves + whatever kitchen scraps we have.

Right now my bins are covered with quite a bit of snow, but I keep dumping the kitchen scraps on top. Can't wait for the snow to melt.

I started out being obsessed by trying to collect as much free organic matter from supermarkets, etc. as I could, but found I was spending more time on my compost piles than I was gardening. Which is what I think most people do that frequent the soil forum. I had to get my priorities straight. Now I'm more relaxed, make a point to turn the piles when they need it, but don't spend too much time collecting ingredients, watering, etc.

We are intown so I use spinners. I have 2, and I spend the winter filling them, then spin them all summer, and I have great compost in the fall that I just dump onto the ground and cover with tarps. I use what I need in the fall and then in Spring, the rest is full of nice big wormies. My hubby does all the cooking, so he saves the veg scraps & paper towels in a big covered jar, then when it's full I transfer that to a plain paper bag with some dryer lint and toss the bag and all into the bin, with some chopped leaves if I think it needs it. I never add water and I don't bother to spin til Spring because it's all frozen in place anyway. The only problem is we're throwing away veg scraps all summer, so I might get more bins to keep it going year round.

I enclose my compost piles with wire. My first three were made from a 50' roll of 4-foot welded wire fence with holes about 1½" x 3". Each pile was about 5½' across by 4' high. The openings in the wire fencing proved to be inconvenient because I had to line the piles at the edges with leaves or pine straw to keep the more finely pulverized material from "leaking" through the wire. I use a MacKissic shredder-chipper with interchangeable screens for the hammermill section, and I put most of my material through a ¼" screen to get a very fine, fluffy material with a lot of surface area, conducive to rapid composting. As the piles grew I continued lining the piles, sort of like a bird lining a nest.

But that "lining" operation was too time consuming. So, for my next three piles, I bought a 50' roll of ¼" hardware cloth, also 4' tall. The three hardware cloth piles are much easier to fill because I don't have to worry about anything "leaking" out through the little ¼" square holes.

My first three piles will probably be tilled into the garden this spring and the second three will probably be turned by simply unhooking the wire cylinders and moving them beside the existing pile as empty cylinders to be filled with the contents of the old pile. I will add some greens (and/or nitrogen fertilizer) as I turn the piles with the objective of getting them to go hot. We have also been adding kitchen scraps right along, but they are a rather small fraction of the total composted material.

As time allows from my regular gardening chores, I will shred and chip some of our remaining brush piles to make new compost piles this summer. If need be, I will get another 50 feet of hardware cloth. I hope to get the new piles to go hot before fall weather cools things off, so they will be ready for use in the spring of '06.

MM

Veilchen, reading your post made me smile, I did the same thing. Last year was our first garden at the new property, I was consumed with the idea that the soil was awful and I began collecting everything. Alot of pet shavings from our Petco in Bangor mixed with house scraps, grass clippings, chopped maple leaves and my good neighbors "What eva ya got!" I had to many things going and not enough order as I think back. I realy love the composting, I made my bin 4x4x8 and turned it weekly, hard work but I loved it. I had the pile at the beginning of the garden about 50' from the house. Just so I wouldnt get lazy. This is going to be moved down to the end and in the middle of my raised beds. But im going to make it look more like a garden, I told my wife to put in some type of flowering vine plant, (flowers are not my thing!) Im also going to set up the raised beds in a more permanent setting and build those paths with the 1000's of old bricks that I have been collecting/buying for the last 2 years. I used a neighbors old split rail fence to make my trellis for my beans but im going to change the look a bit, instead of the normal up & down row style Im going to let it stretch its wings a bit. I think this year im going to see if I can work on the gardens style, feel and see if it can be a bit more relaxing. Not so much less work but how it makes one feel upon entering the area. My wife and friends remind me that it was only year one, that these things take time and how great everything came out. I think about that nap I took one sunday afternoon listening to the Sox play, what a waste of time. I mean there's weeds to pull, bricks to set, things to tie up...is that a bug? Whats that spot?...... I think I look forward to putting up the hammock the most.
Mac

macropora, I fantasize about taking a nap (or just lying down) in a hammock in my yard. I told dh to get me one. But I think if I had one, it would be hard to stop working in the garden and actually lie down.

I have a hammock in my porch, on the floor waiting to be put up outside. I cant decide where to put it and I dont want it to weather, so I am waiting to put it up sometime before the mosqitoes and black flies -but warm enough to enjoy!
Maine man, I was wondering how you unhook the hardware cloth...I have used the hardware cloth to improve my chicken pen abd that wire edges are really sharp and kinda scarey to me. HOw do you work the edges of the cloth to unhook and turn the pile as need be.

I do like the simple idea of using cinder blocks, however with this neighbor dog...the hardware cloth seems to be the better approach.

Isn't the leash law a statewide thing? Just a thought....

I've been composting for years. Nine years at an apartment in Portland (fortunate enough to have a courtyard) and for the last two out here in the foothills. We're seeking compost material quite aggressively now, since we have sand and no organic matter on the front four acres. We've brought several truckloads of leaves home (them city people just throw that stuff away!) and calling anyone with horses a friend. Yeah, the manure's weedy, but the lawn is starting to look awesome and we didn't even have to buy seed :) We tried the pallets, but the pile outgrew them. Now we just pile it out in the middle of the field that will become an orchard this spring. I'm hoping that we'll be able to self-sustain with just our own garden waste after a couple more years. It's taking hours to turn a 20' x 20' x 4' pile!

Our 2nd spinner will be full in a couple weeks and then that's it til fall, so if anyone knows someone in L-A who'd like food scraps, dryer lint et cetera, I'd love to give it away instead of putting it out in the trash. There's only 2 of us, so it adds up to about 2 paper bags full a week.

L-A? I'll take what ever you dont use!

Where do you live? I'll drop it off!

I dont know where L-A is, I was asking, but I live on MDI. I'd trade you plants for your compost if you drove the distance. :)

Sue,

"I was wondering how you unhook the hardware cloth... I have used the hardware cloth to improve my chicken pen and the wire edges are really sharp and kinda scarey to me. How do you work the edges of the cloth to unhook and turn the pile as need be?"

I thought about bending over all of the exposed wires to make hooks, but found that I didn't need to do that. I just left the edges "raw" and straight and used a couple of pieces of twist ties to tie the ends of the wire together at a couple of places, one up near the top and one down toward the bottom. I overlapped the wire about a foot so there was some natural friction.

I did drive a 5-foot piece of rebar in on each side of the pile and twist-tied the hardware cloth to the rebars to act as stabilization for the hardware cloth cylinders until the piles get reasonably full and self-stabilizing.

The weight of the compost doesn't exert a lot of pulling force on the wire, so the twist ties were adequate and are easily removed when it comes time to turn the pile. I just peel the wire off of the pile and reattach it nearby and shovel from the free-standing "naked" pile into the new wire enclosure.

I do try to be careful not to scratch myself on the raw edges of the hardware cloth. So far that hasn't been a problem. If that does become a problem, I will take the time to bend the individual wires back flush.

MM

Welllll, MDI is 3 hours away, but it was a good idea for a minute there!

My husband and I have tried a composter with a worm elevator. It has a metal base and is made of recycled plastic, dark. Screens to keep out maggot type flies and it worked well if you put table spoon lime, tablespoon full bonemeal and moved the stuff around with a metal thing. It comes apart to get the stuff out but I think the worms left long ago. It makes enough to cover an inch on one of our three raised vegetable beds but is a lot of work I think. Only fits kitchen scraps only veggie not meat or potato peelings. Potatos can cause a disease in the soil that kills raspberries and it did kill ours before we found this out. I battled a red squirrel that got inside by throwing off the cover so we put a spare tire my brother left on top to keep it out. Can't chew throught the plastic but it sure tried.

We just throw our other stuff like mowing grass from the fields and garden junk in a pile and it composts slower but less work. I would like to know more about the spinning type. Do they really work and are they easy to turn?