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 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’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 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.
