Compost Awareness Week 2010: Composting Outside the Bin

Reader Contribution by Barbara Pleasant
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More people gardening means more people composting, because you can’t grow an organic kitchen garden without having a place to throw castoff plant parts. New composters, I fear, fall prey to the “gotta have a great compost bin” syndrome, and spend a lot of mental energy and money on things they don’t really need. Dead plants already know how to rot.

The upcoming Compost Awareness Week (May 3-8, 2010) got me thinking that low-tech compost deserves the spotlight for a change. The classic no-frills, slowly shrinking compost pile now has many names — cold compost, feed-and-forget compost, and even dump compost. Personally, I like to call it homestead compost, because when you’re living self-sufficiently by gardening a lot and cooking every day, eventually you end up with a darn good compost pile. Or maybe several! Our composting poll shows that for many readers, one composting project is not enough.

Compost Can, Compost Bin or Both?

As a long-time composter, I find that I do like having a stationary composter for collecting raw materials. The stuff from the kitchen compost pail is more attractive to unwanted critters than it is to me, and a stationary composter (or garbage-can composter) keeps coffee filters and slimy eggshells in a suitably secret place. But no miracles of decomposition happen inside my glossy black Earth Machine. Instead, it functions like a garden garbage can. When it starts getting full, I lift it off and the cone of contents becomes a compost pile in progress. I move the composter to a new spot and start filling it up again.

Various types of compost bins, pens and other enclosures seem like a good idea, and it’s a fact that at least one vertical retaining wall can go a long way toward keeping a compost heap moist. But compost enclosures in general tend to get in the way. I rarely turn a compost pile, but I am prone to chop away with a mattock when I decide that my homestead compost needs mixing — usually toward the end of the composting process, when the mountain has shrunk into a big lump. Unless you can take them down quickly, compost enclosures that limit access may be more trouble than they’re worth.

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