Composting in the garden: more bins please!
The only problem with garden composting is that you spend all that time researching the perfect garden composter only to find that once you start, you need another one. It doesn’t really matter if you’re buying or making your own garden compost bin, you’ll always want another to go along with it!
Two containers is really the absolute minimum any gardener needs. Oh, you can get by with one (I’ve got it, I just didn’t like it), but you’ll need an ‘organic storage area’. Let’s face it, if you’re making a huge pile of stuff that will eventually go into a compost bin, you could also turn it into your own compost heap or (the easiest solution) buy or make another garden compost bin to cut out the middleman. .
Ideally, we should add all our kitchen and garden waste to a compost bin within a few months. Then, when it is full, we must leave it alone for a few months so that it decomposes into that beautiful garden compost that we are looking for. This leaves us with the dilemma of what to do with all the new waste that we generate during these few months:
Storage ready for hot composting
If you store all your organic matter in the open air, it will decompose a bit, but not much. Then, when your garden composter has been emptied of newly created hummus, you can fill it with your huge pile of barely rotten composting ingredients. Because you are putting a large amount of matter in the bin at one time, you will find that it heats up very quickly and will decompose much faster than your first “slow burn” approach to filling the compost bin.
Many people love this ‘hot compost’ approach to garden composting. Creates rich, well-rotted compost very quickly. But add to that the nuisance factor of an open pile of debris cluttering the garden, attracting wildlife, and hot compost may not be worth it.
open compost heap
Of course, while your fancy new backyard composter is doing its job of breaking down your organic waste, you can go for the lower-tech approach. Simply create an open compost heap and use it while your compost bin is out of commission.
But, this gives you much slower composting and means you need to animal proof the heap or build some kind of box yourself.
Get another yard compost bin
This is the obvious answer. Get another container to sit next to the first one. So you should always have one that adds and one that rots. But, once you go this route, you may not have time to use the ready compost in the first bin, the second is full, and now you need a third to add your waste to, too. When this blog started, I was the proud owner of three compost bins, but now I have four, plus a storage area for clippings I don’t want to add all at once!
Garden composting seems to take over the entire garden!