There are a few things to take into consideration when deciding what type of composter to build or buy.- How much effort are you going to put into composting?
- What, and how much do you plan to compost?
- How much money do you want to spend?
There are composters for every style, compost volume and price range.
With two horses and a garden, as well as our kitchen vegetable scraps, we planned for a fairly large volume of compost - the horses being the biggest producers of waste. We really like to two-bay tumbler-style compost bins but the ones that are big enough are out of our price range. Instead, we opted to build our own. For less than the cost of a small tumbler composter, we built a two-bay, 8X4 composter out of landscaping timbers and rebar.
After doing some research, we settled on a composter in the style of the Compost Corral featured at this link (and in the picture above). We made just a few small alterations to the basic construction. First, we made it taller, using 4ft rebar instead of the 2 ft rebar recommended. Second, rather than making a huge, 8x8 compost pile, we cut some of the landscaping timbers in half and made it 4x8. Last, rather than one big 4x8 rectangle, we placed a dividing wall in the middle to make to 4x4 bins. This way, once one side is full, we can let it "cook" while we continue to add to the other pile.
Tune in to the next blog to see to details on how to build it and how it turned out.
The Red Clay Farmers
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