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Post by ComfortZone on Mar 10, 2024 11:11:14 GMT 12
Looking at composting our household waste. Does the team have recommendations on best type of bin - static or rotating drum (or other option) to use and any tips for the best decomposition?
We are a 2 adult household so not a large amount of waste
I see Bunnings/M 10/ Garden centres have a huge variety of bins, bit hard to make a decision.
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Post by eri on Mar 10, 2024 11:45:33 GMT 12
i just bury it in the garden 10-40cm deep. with a plastic bucket over the top, when each hole is full i dig another next to it and use that soil to cover the the compost with 10cm of dirt
eventually i circle back to the first hole and find the 90% composted material full of worms......not sure how a rotating drum would help the worms
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Post by Fogg on Mar 10, 2024 11:46:27 GMT 12
What kind of waste are we talking about?
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Post by ComfortZone on Mar 10, 2024 12:06:13 GMT 12
What kind of waste are we talking about? Kitchen fruit and vege scraps. Have a never ending supply of cut grass to bulk it up |
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Post by fish on Mar 10, 2024 12:06:29 GMT 12
The missus is in to composting bigly. Was teaching gardening at school.
Probably your biggest consideration is rats. Because of that, I'd start out with one of the off the ground rotating drums. Anything sitting on the ground will just get rats in it. Noting that rats are very good at aerating the compost (they dig tunnels all through it), but, you will have big, hairy rats everywhere.
The round ones are good for mixing the food scraps into the compost. Get a two sided on, so you can load one side for a month while the other is breaking down. If you are a bit short on capacity, you can do the initial break down in the tumbler one, then transfer it to a ground based model, or just a pile on the ground, for final breakdown. Being able to rotate it helps with aeration and good quick breakdown too. As does sitting it in a sunny spot.
With just two adults a standard tumbler style should be ok or near to it for capacity.
Other options are worm farms and bokashi. Worms will produce amazing soil and juice to water onto the gardens, but need to be fed regularly with food scraps, so I imagine this wont work if you go sailing all the time.
The key advantage with bokashi is it can take meat. Very easy to do as well. Get two old paint buckets (like a 10l plastic bucket), drill holes in the bottom of one and sit it inside the second one. You sprinkle some of the magic bokashi powder on every time you load scraps into it - similar to a composting toilet, accept I believe the bokashi powder is inoculated with bacteria that do all the magic composting. In theory bokashi doesn't smell, but in practice, if you get it wrong (like the ratio of meat to organics) and can be a very foul odour. Oh, and I think you can't put citrus into bokashi.
If you get into your composting bigly, you can put alot of carbon into it, as in brown cardboard. Toilet rolls, boxes / packaging / newspaper etc. You have to take any tape off it, and just brown cardboard, not glossy or printed stuff. Balancing all the nitrogen from food waste with carbon from other sources produces a far better soil / compost.
PS, I think bokashi can handle fish frames if you do it right, and you are into that, but I find it far easier to bury fish frames in spots I'm planning future planting. That and it avoids the risk of a bokashi failure and gag inducing odour.
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Post by Fogg on Mar 10, 2024 17:55:41 GMT 12
What kind of waste are we talking about? Kitchen fruit and vege scraps. Have a never ending supply of cut grass to bulk it up What’s wrong with flushing that down the kitchen sink via a waste disposal unit? We’ve done that for years. A few months back we upgraded our unit from a standard $500 ‘toy’ to an industrial grade unit which was only about $1,000 ie not a completely nuts amount extra. It chews up pretty much anything with the bonus of being smooth and virtually silent. |
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Post by sloopjohnb on Mar 10, 2024 19:08:36 GMT 12
Fogg that extra wattage you are using is preventing me from charging my car!  |
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Post by ComfortZone on Mar 10, 2024 19:22:07 GMT 12
Kitchen fruit and vege scraps. Have a never ending supply of cut grass to bulk it up What’s wrong with flushing that down the kitchen sink via a waste disposal unit? We’ve done that for years. A few months back we upgraded our unit from a standard $500 ‘toy’ to an industrial grade unit which was only about $1,000 ie not a completely nuts amount extra. It chews up pretty much anything with the bonus of being smooth and virtually silent. septic tank! |
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Post by fish on Mar 10, 2024 20:18:45 GMT 12
Kitchen fruit and vege scraps. Have a never ending supply of cut grass to bulk it up What’s wrong with flushing that down the kitchen sink via a waste disposal unit? We’ve done that for years. A few months back we upgraded our unit from a standard $500 ‘toy’ to an industrial grade unit which was only about $1,000 ie not a completely nuts amount extra. It chews up pretty much anything with the bonus of being smooth and virtually silent. That is bad for lots of things. Mainly the environment. Increases load to the wastewater treatment plants, which cost $$$. Increases nitrogen emissions at the WWTP, which is apparently going to make our world end. Also increases bio-solids. There is absolutely zero we can do with solids ex a WWTP, accept put it in a landfill. Which is all fairly much why the Council are charging us for those little bins to divert food waste to a composting plant south of Rotorua, to avoid food waste going straight to landfill or going through a waste disposer and chocking up all of the already half fuck WWTPs. |
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Post by DuckMaster on Mar 11, 2024 8:53:43 GMT 12
Kitchen fruit and vege scraps. Have a never ending supply of cut grass to bulk it up What’s wrong with flushing that down the kitchen sink via a waste disposal unit? We’ve done that for years. A few months back we upgraded our unit from a standard $500 ‘toy’ to an industrial grade unit which was only about $1,000 ie not a completely nuts amount extra. It chews up pretty much anything with the bonus of being smooth and virtually silent. It's a terrible thing to do for numerous reasons. |
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Post by DuckMaster on Mar 11, 2024 9:02:33 GMT 12
I have one of those black 200l bins from bunnings.
Clean cardboard and garden waste go in it and the table scraps. I have a 75cm auger on the drill to mix it up and air rate it which I do every other week if I am in the mood.
To generate heat grass clippings go in it. It breaks down really fast when I add a couple of catchers full of grass to it.
It hits about 70deg c when the grass is mixed in.
If you're rural then hot composting is the best bet for you. You need 1m3 to make it work. My black bin is too small really so it loses heat to fast.
Google hot composting and you'll find all the answers.
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