what’s up, everyone? i’m Andy, a new moderator of c/composting. i figure i can at least post a heaptalk thread for us to talk about our composting efforts. where are you, geographically, and what challenges do you face? what kind of composting setup do you have?
I’m located in the mid-Atlantic of the US. We just have a small spinning composter that we dump our kitchen scraps into. No real problems with the composting part, it’s just the actually tending to our garden that’s hard!
I live in Massachusetts and take the most lazy route for composting because I have space. I just rake up all the leaves in the fall into a giant pile near my compost and all year long I just layer leaves and greens. Once a year I start a new pile and occasionally I’ll turn the piles. Otherwise i let worms and critters do their jobs! I’m setup as a host on ShareWaste and have other families bring their compostable junk to me so my piles are substantial.
thanks to your post here i looked up Sharewaste and am now a host myself!
as for me, i live in Western Colorado, USA - in the high desert. we get a ton of direct sunlight, it’s really hot in the summer and can get really cold in the winter - USDA hardiness zone 6b/7a. it is also a very arid land.
my setup is super basic, as lazy as it gets. i use a pallet compost bin that i made out of free pallets i got from the neighborhood, pretty much as shown in this link. we keep our kitchen scraps and i add to the pile generally once a week. we also add yard waste of our own, and that of friends and family and neighbors occasionally. i water the pile irregularly as i am extremely lazy, but i do have a water barrel set up nearby that, in the future, i will use to drip irrigate the pile, but that’s a next spring project now. something for future Andy; we hate that guy! ha.
we also are using chopped up leaf mulch as compost on a part of our back yard that we are turning from a dirt patch into a garden. this is sort of a compost-in-place situation, or a lasagna mulching situation. it’s not amazing, but it works; i grew potatoes in a wood chip mulch this year, so i am hopeful it will work next year.
I moved my small compost into a greenhouse this year, as previously it was waterlogged from rain half of the time. I expected it to work better, but it seems to have ended up way too dry and all the worms are gone.
