We compost, now what?

One of my big things for this year was that I wanted to compost. I started reading about it last year but with the pregnancy and me practically being incapacitated, it wasn’t feasible for us to start - especially since it was something I wanted to do but Sean would have to do all the work. Early this spring I started thinking about it again and researching options. I know it can be as simple as a “pile” but we live in the city in a neighborhood and I didn’t really want to create a “pile” in our backyard. And the garden is right up against the back of the house where our bedrooms are and I didn’t want to do it there either. Retail composters can be ridiculously expensive so we were left weighing our options.

Fortunately, Sean’s SIL Denise wanted to compost too and his brother decided he wanted to make a tumbling composter. He found instructions on the internet but it required an enormous pickle barrel and the only place he could find those was in Kentucky. Believe it or not, he drove down and bought 2 – one of for us, one for them. I still can’t believe Eric drove to Kentucky just to buy 2 pickle barrels but I’m glad he did.

We scheduled a Saturday for us to go to Eric & Denise’s to make the compost bins and all was well. We got there shortly after lunch and they got started. It didn’t take them long to realize it was going to be more difficult than they thought. Turns out the directions were merely a diagram! Afternoon turned into evening and I was exhausted from trying to juggle the babies away from home. Despite much help from Denise & Adrienne, I just needed to go home. We decided that Sean should just stay as long as he needed to to finish it because we didn’t know when we’d have another weekend for him to do that. Luckily, we had driven separate since there was no way the finished product was fitting in my car.

Sean didn’t get home until almost midnight but our composter is awesome! I’ve thoroughly enjoyed dutifully taking our scraps out and dumping in the stinky bin (it’s behind the garage for optimal sun) and dodging all the bugs. But last night Sean said, “So when do we stop putting stuff in there?” I said, “That’s a good question. I guess I’ll have to look that up.” I was so set on getting started I never researched how long it would take or how full we should make it can still tumble and breakdown, etc. I guess I need to get on that.