Compost bins how do you fill yours ?

[Newishgardener]

What's the specific difference between a Dalek (compost bin) and a wormary ? I only ask as my Dalek has worms in it so is this a wormary Dalek ?


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[Veggielot]

We get horse manure delivered to our site so that forms the basis of my compost. I avoid weeds, meat and dog/cat poo but pretty much and everything else including Bigmally's favourite ingredient. The important thing is to try and get a balance between green and brown ingredients.

I would recommend chopping up, I put some wormy carrots and beetroot in whole in one of my bins the other year and they were still pretty much still there a year later.

[Bigmallly]

My understanding is that a wormery is normally used to get the beneficial juice that can be collected so if you can drain off the juice to dilute as feed then yes basically you will have a large wormery.

[Penellype]

Until last year I made compost in a 3ft square wooden bin, putting in a mixture of garden waste (not perennial roots or seed heads), grass cuttings, spent compost, chopped twigs etc, plus some horse manure (with wood shavings), but no paper, card or food waste. I tried to chop most things up as fine as possible by hand, but it was always full of chunky bits and patches of dry, unrotted stuff, particularly perennial stalks and leaves from the autumn tidy up. I used to find it took about 2 years for it to rot down after 2 or 3 turnings, and when I turned it I would separate out any that looked rotted enough to use.

Last year I bought a hotbin. Everything is chopped and I try to add a balanced mixture of greens including seed heads, shredded paper and card, shredded wood and sometimes leaves, roots (including perennials), horse manure and food waste (including bones). The compost is ready in about 3 months, although it is fairly chunky and quite wet and sticky. It is quite hard to keep the bin hot in the winter because the best thing to heat it up is grass cuttings, so it rots a bit more slowly. I cut my lawn the other day and put some grass in the mix and the temperature in the bin shot up over 20 degrees over night.

[Newishgardener]

Last year I bought a hotbin. Everything is chopped and I try to add a balanced mixture of greens including seed heads, shredded paper and card, shredded wood and sometimes leaves, roots (including perennials), horse manure and food waste (including bones). The compost is ready in about 3 months, although it is fairly chunky and quite wet and sticky. It is quite hard to keep the bin hot in the winter because the best thing to heat it up is grass cuttings, so it rots a bit more slowly. I cut my lawn the other day and put some grass in the mix and the temperature in the bin shot up over 20 degrees over night.

Would I be right in thinking that the hot bin kills off any seeds that go in to the bin ? Although I am surprised that bones will break down as well


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[Penellype]

Yes the hotbin kills off seeds, and supposedly pests and diseases too, providing that it operates at temperatures of above 40C (mine is currently running at around 55C after adding the grass). Some of the bones appear to break down - larger ones don't, although any attached tissues have rotted away. I'm talking chicken bones - I don't buy cuts of meat with bigger bones than these in. I chuck any I find back into the hotbin as they help keep it aerated, if I end up with too many I will start chopping them up or throwing them away.

[Chippy Minton]

Like most of the others I chuck in kitchen veg peelings and the such, tea bags, egg shells, anything really that's not bones, meat or fried. We have rabbits and chickens so there's plenty of browns (sawdust, compressed sawdust litter, straw) and "accelerators" (not like BigMally as we're overlooked )

Time taken is a bit difficult as it goes in the top and I take it out of the bottom until it starts looking like the input and then jiggle it down and keep filling from the top (works for us with 4 Daleks)

The only thing maybe different for me is I don't chop or smash anything, I just sieve the output and any big bits go back in the top to have another go round on the assumption they'll break down eventually. I find Avocado seeds, egg shells and corn cobs like a few trips through. I like this method as it plays to one of my key strengths I like to call laziness

[Two_Sheds]

... some of it was a stinking mess so fingers crossed I haven't completely cocked it up!

It shouldn't be stinky, nor a mess. It seems like you're putting in too many greens (kitchen scraps). Try wrapping those in sheets of newspaper, and you'll find it works much better

What's the specific difference between a Dalek (compost bin) and a wormary ?

Money?
Wormeries are more expensive than daleks, and you buy the original worms. As you've noted, compost worms will find their own way in

[Newishgardener]

Thanks for all the advice :-) I have never thought about putting egg shells in to be honest we do put our spent coffee grounds in and sometimes peelings from home but it seems to take almost a year for it all to break down I think this year we are going to be cutting things up a bit more as we went more for the just throw everything in approach.


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[Newishgardener]

Does anyone know if you can get Dalek spares ? I have got two and one of them hasn't got a proper lid or front cover


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[Kristen]

I have a couple of Daleks, only because they were price-sponsored by local council, and I wasn't getting around to building a nice frame for my heap (still haven't). Its a pipe-dream that beautiful rich compost will just pour out of the little door at the bottom! - but the fact that they are cone shaped means that, if I shoulder barge it a few times to loosen it up, I can lift it off the heap for unloading. The lid is handy to keep excess rain out, and perhaps the marketing people are to be believed that being black it heats up enough in the sun to make a difference (although the bugs will get it to 50-60C in the core, I can't see a black outer lining achieving that ...)

Time was, many moons ago, when I put a lot of effort into composting ... maybe I should again? ... getting the mix right, turning it every month, and so on. Now I put the contents of the kitchen compost bin (All veg peelings, veg left overs from dinner plates, tea bags, coffee, and scraps of paper (but not masses), old Cornflake packets torn up, mouldy loaves of bread) into the Dalek, and some weeding, and prunings from Tomatoes etc. in greenhouse (as Daleks are near there), but for the main weeding in garden, and autumn pruning etc. it all just goes on a big heap and is left there for a year or two - the heap just grows longways. Every so often I get a self drive JCB in (whenever I can think of a good excuse!) and I dig out the compost heap, roughly separating the "skin" from the good stuff in the middle, and then make use of it in the garden.

All my grass clippings go in another heap. Grass provide plenty of heat in a compost heap, but any reasonable quantity will go Anaerobic and make a smelly mess of the heap, and Aerobic decomposition is what is needed. Also, most?? selective herbicides for lawns contain persistent chemicals, which will survive composting and then kill vegetable plants when the compost is used (grass clippings from treated lawns aren't supposed to even be put in council brown bins), so I keep my grass composting separate, and leave it for years before using it. (And now I have a nice new, wide, cylinder mower which doesn't collect, so I don't have anything like the volume as in the days when I had 24" stripes up & down my lawns )

I pee on the heap when I close the greenhouse up in the evening (during Spring / Summer / Autumn months per se)

I do try to keep pernicious weeds out of the heap, and I have a container next to the heap full of water, and all bindweed roots etc. go into that. After a couple of weeks drowning they are properly dead and I tip the whole lot on the heap and refill with water for the next batch. But in reality I don't always manage to weed before some seed is set, so I live with having compost that contains weed seeds and some weed roots too.

I replace the "soil" in the greenhouse borders each Autumn. I use a mixture of rough material from the compost heap (so, well rotted, but full of stalks and stuff) and well rotted manure, about 50:50. Weeds germinate but in the main don't like the conditions in the greenhouse - no surface water from rain, as I water to the base of each plant - that causes a lot to germinate and succumb, leaving less viable seed in the remaining compost.

The "soil" that comes out of the greenhouse borders each Autumn, from previous year, is lovely and fine having had a season of use in the greenhouse, and that makes a great mulch for Asparagus bed, also I use it for Autumn potting of things like Cannas and Dahlias coming in from the garden, into pots, for the Winter (I pot them in the Autumn, rather than store in trays and then start them off in Spring, as Spring has so many jobs there isn't time, so the Autumn potting does instead of my Spring potting)

And then the cycle repeats

[Bill HH]

It seems to me that whatever we do, compost will make itself. it's really a matter of time. Intensive activiy will get you useable compost if three months, no activity will do it in a year maybe two. If you have no time pressures and lots of space you can adopt the easy route.

This concept is know as the "space–time continuum"

[Kristen]

It seems to me that whatever we do, compost will make itself. it's really a matter of time. Intensive activiy will get you useable compost if three months, no activity will do it in a year maybe two.

Do you think that compost made "fast" is better?

It would be a hotter process, therefore more likely to kill disease / weed seeds, but not a given (particularly any material towards the outside of the heap).

But perhaps the material is more friable, or some other benefit?

That (and Space) apart, "speed" has no benefit that I can see after the first heap has matured. i.e. if it takes 2 years then, thereafter, you get compost at the same steady state as the fast method, you just had to wait 2 years for your first "harvest" [and buy in alternative material during that period - in my case I would use manure from local farms / stables].

Personally, I think most people will struggle to have the right mix of materials , and enough of them, to be able to generate good quality (not full of woody bits) compost "fast".

A wormery might be better for that job ... although I think keeping them alive and happy is a bit of an "art"; against that is, perhaps, the convenience of having the wormery "in the house" so can just put the vegetable peelings directly into the wormery, rather than a compost bin and then trudge out to the compost heap to empty it every so often.

[Madasafish]

My two Daleks - on soil and filled with kitchen waste - act as wormeries.. Millions (?) of red compost worms.. usable but rather heavy compost full of teabag covers:-).

Ideal for anything..

I just feed one whilst leaving the other to be eaten down - takes 6 months if started now: 9 months if started September (cold).

[Penellype]

Do you think that compost made "fast" is better?

It would be a hotter process, therefore more likely to kill disease / weed seeds, but not a given (particularly any material towards the outside of the heap).

But perhaps the material is more friable, or some other benefit?

That (and Space) apart, "speed" has no benefit that I can see after the first heap has matured. i.e. if it takes 2 years then, thereafter, you get compost at the same steady state as the fast method, you just had to wait 2 years for your first "harvest" [and buy in alternative material during that period - in my case I would use manure from local farms / stables].

Personally, I think most people will struggle to have the right mix of materials , and enough of them, to be able to generate good quality (not full of woody bits) compost "fast".

A wormery might be better for that job ... although I think keeping them alive and happy is a bit of an "art"; against that is, perhaps, the convenience of having the wormery "in the house" so can just put the vegetable peelings directly into the wormery, rather than a compost bin and then trudge out to the compost heap to empty it every so often.

From my point of view, and one of the main reasons for getting the hotbin, one of the problems with cold composting was the space required. I simply don't have room for 3 heaps and I was finding I had a full bin, with rotted stuff underneath and nowhere to turn it to. With the hotbin the bulky stuff rots down fast if the bin is nicely hot, meaning that it takes up less space.