Spring has arrived and we finally bought a composter!!! Very exciting! For the past nine months I have been feeling bad about throwing away my veggie scraps. Now I can happily save my juicing pulp, along with my veggie scraps, to put towards making good soil to grow a few plants. We purchased a tumbler style composter, at a big box store. The brand is 'Keter Dynamic Turn and Go Composter.' The price was reasonable compared to what we saw online. The unfortunate part was that it came in pieces.
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This made for a nice Sunday morning project for Ben after breakfast. I will have to say getting those curved barrel panels to pop into place caused much gnashing of the teeth. Eventually with all four hands we were able to wrangle the bugger, and get the outer rim screwed on. After that it was a breeze to put the rest of the parts together.
Then we took our little baby outside to find a level sunny spot to place the new tumbler. I had saved vegetable and fruit scraps all week knowing we were going to have the composter soon! I feel pretty good when I look outside and see our composter. We can also place a bucket under the barrel, to catch compost tea to fertilize our garden.
Back to the kitchen to get what we needed next. Oh! What a mess-o-produce-bags filled with mush I had piled on the counter! We carried the rotting goodies out to the composter and Ben did the inaugural dumping of the veggi mess. I took a picture of the scraps inside the tumbler...but it was kinda gross! So I am not posting that one!
We had also purchased an Oggi Bamboo kitchen counter-top compost bin to collect our scraps in the house. That goodie arrived just two days ago and it will need to be emptied into the composter tomorrow already. Which works out because you have to spin the barrel 5 times every few days. This looks way better than those bags!
We need to check our aeration holes on the barrel tumbler, and make sure most are open to provide the vital oxygen. I have not done composting for over 30 years, so I have to read up on the smelly basics. Back in the day we used to do it in an outdoor area made up of 3 cinder block walls, into which we shoveled a mix of garden debris, kitchen scraps, hay, horse manure, and leaves. We grew thirty different awesome vegetables, and a few towering sunflowers back then. Now I have to get my current little garden bed built up with timbers. Since the area is on a hill, I keep losing soil and water, so something has to be built. Since we rent, we cannot make a big garden.
Here is our cute little bamboo can for kitchen scraps. It has a charcoal filter to keep down the odor. I did some research online and a lot of people seem to like this one.
It's made of eco friendly bamboo fiber, so that is good. I decided to line the can with my veggie produce bags, so it does not get dirty inside. We reuse those bags constantly around the house, besides using them in the juicer pulp container.
That kitchen countertop composter can is already full with veggie pulp! Well the next item up to buy is a rain barrel, so we can collect the rain to water the garden.
Enjoy the welcoming sights and smells of Spring! Smelly good... and smelly bad!
Update: We have twice had a bad experience with our Keter rotating barrel composter. During spinning, the door came off and dumped the rotting contents out and under the composter making a mess. The liquid stains clean concrete. You would think they would design a door that did not fall off. The door was locked as tight as can be, before I tumbled the contents. I always check that to be sure. This is what bothers me about the composter, that such an important area is faulty. Nature does its thing very well turning my leftover veggie and fruit scraps into dirt and compost tea. We also now keep a new kitty litter box under the composter to collect the tea. After the last smelly spillage event, we moved the rotating composter to a spot on the lawn behind our garage near my garden.
Our Oggi Bamboo counter-top composter bucket has been great! There is no smell and I still like the way it looks in the kitchen.