A Compost Bin Creates Rich Organic Material for Your Garden

Composting has been something that I definitely knew was beneficial however it is also something I resisted for years. I ended up buying bags of organic material at garden shops to use in my flower beds and garden. Sometimes I created my own mixture of part peat, sand, and soil to create a mixture to use for planning or enriching soil. Finally I decided I needed to compost. I had all of the materials, I had read numerous articles in garden books and magazines touting the benefits, and I knew that it was something that could easily be accomplished.

My husband and I decided to purchase a compost bin. The lightweight bin has four sides that slide and snap into place and a hinged top cover. The compost bin may be emptied, cleaned and stored or moved to another location. Assembly took only minutes. The bin is open on the bottom. Each side has a small sliding door on the bottom which can be used to scoop the compost from the bin. The top is hinged so that it can be fully opened for easy loading. The sides of the bin are slotted for circulation. We decided to place concrete pavers in front of each of the sliding doors to make scooping the compost easier and to ensure that we will not be removing too much soil around the bin in the process. We filled the areas between the pavers and around the bottom of the bin with pea gravel.

I began to save as much waste organic material from my kitchen as I could. I designated a large, empty, plastic coffee container as my compost collection bucket. I began to deposit the used coffee grounds, eggshells, banana peels, cucumber peels, all meal scraps and other waste materials into the container to be used in the compost bin.

We quickly filled the compost bin with small sticks, leaves, and grass clippings. We added the saved kitchen waste and tore newspaper into strips to add also. We filled the compost bucket with water and poured it over the filled bin rinsing the bucket at the same time. The lid was ceremoniously closed. We were composting!

We have created loose compost areas before on our property by just designating an out of the way area where we pile sticks, branches, grass clippings and leaves. The materials break down and do form compost. The rain and sun supply most of the other needs for this simple compost. The loose pile does need to by turned to help the materials breakdown faster and to create a more uniform compost.

Using a contained compost bin is a new experience for us. And while we did dump some kitchen waste onto the loose compost pile this is the first effort for me to actually be conscious of collecting and using this precious resource. Our goals are to create quality compost for building several raised garden beds. This seems like a great first step in the right direction.

If this simple bin produces the quality compost that we are looking for I'm sure we will be building a larger system of bins. There are many plans available for building a simple bin or a multi-stage system for composting. The three stage system takes quite a bit of room and an initial outlay of expense for materials to build the system however it looks like it would be a very effective method for producing enough compost for a large garden or a series of small raised beds.