I want to minimize my environmental impact. One way I do this is by composting, which greatly reduces the methane in landfills. I line my indoor compost bin with the bags. I want to know if I could just throw out these bags knowing that they would decompose in the landfill. I also want to reduce my use of standard plastic bags. If I do compost the bags in my backyard, what is the best way to do so?

I am new to composting. But I don't have an open backyard as such. I have a small apartment balcony. My question is - can I start composting in something as small as a 12 inch bucket?

I'd like a small amount of compost as I am new to it and not sure what kind of insects it will attract. I don't want that to affect the small garden area i have in my balcony.

Any advice will be highly appreciated.

I put my composting bin under a bird feeder, as I figured the bird droppings and seed shells would be good for it. But I'm a little worried about the bird flu. I intend to use this compost in a vegetable garden. Does composting make it safe? Do I need to let it sit longer than usual? Any advice is appreciated!

I'm getting ready to build my first compost bin for my fairly new (to me) garden. I was considering this design, basically:

https://www.practicallyfunctional.com/how-to-build-a-diy-compost-bin/

(If you don't want to click through, it's basically a 3x3' box with the bottom half of the front side of it being an access door.)

I was going to build two of these side by side (sharing the divider wall), thinking that I might need to move the compost from one to the second for long composting. I read that the low access door is helpful for getting the good stuff out of the bottom when it's ready to move/use. I showed my partner the plans and he's concerned that it will be a total pain shoveling out from the bottom of the bin, which now that I'm thinking of it, makes sense.

Opinions? Bottom door? Larger door with hinges on the side so the whole thing opens? Would love advice from those who have done this.

Ive been successfully composting for a while. But when I moved to a new place I bought a similar barrel to this and I’m having no success. I add a good mix of greens and browns, turn it from time to time. It has been about a year and a half, but when open the door at the bottom, my compost looks like light brown leaf mold. Any advice?

So I’ve been adding my browns / greens over time. I had been urinating in a bottle and just put it all on my “compost”. I’m assuming it won’t break down until summer but I figured I’d ask and make sure I’m doing this right since it’s my first time.

Been letting this side marinade for about a month now with occasional coffee grounds added in

I've read some different threads on kitchen composters, and I can't really figure out which one will fit my needs. Basically the use case is, I do some temporary living/traveling in an RV and I want to minimize waste output as much as possible. When out boondocking one of the biggest logistics hurdles is figuring out what to do with trash. I burn paper, wash/store/break down plastics/recyclables for later recycling, and bin anything that cant be recycled/burned for later drop into trash.

I'd like to eliminate food waste from my bin trash as well. Which one of these "composters" have you used that can hold a decent bit of food scraps/waste, quiet, and hopefully at least somewhat power efficient.

I've looked at the Mill and I like the fact that it looks like it can potentially hold weeks of food scraps which would even let me bring the stuff all the way back home to my home compost pile. It's kinda big which is sort of a down side, but I guess that's offset by the fact that it can hold a large amount of food scraps.

Besides that, any recommendations? I don't really need/want anything smart, but if it's my only choice that's fine. I want to put food in, push button, forget it exists, repeat.

Thanks.

So I don't know who's familiar with a marula fruit but I've got a tree at home that drops hundreds of them and they stink and are a hassle to get rid of everytime so I was wondering if I can add them to my worm bins overtime? The worms just might get a little drunk 😂 I'm based in South Africa.

Hey people!

About a month and a half 2 months ago , i was trying out an idea for a statically aerated bokashi soil factory that might have went horribly wrong😂😂. I made a trash can with a side vent and a lid vent both covered with plastic window screen and added a mixture of a 5 gallon bucket full of bokashi bio pulp mixed with about 2 buckets of hydrated wood pellets as browns and some other stuff like bbq ash and charcoal and eggshells. I added a perforated irrigation hose in a coil while i added the compostables, the idea was that the hose with the vents will keep it from going anaerobic. I also added about 50-100 juvenile red wigglers to the top. I checked it frequently for the first 2 weeks but not much was happening so i forgot about it for a while, i checked it today and there was a whole population on flies flying on the inside, upside is the window screen is keeping them on the inside of the bin, i'm not sure what type of flies they are but they are the size of house flies so i think they aren't fruit flies, i don't want to open the lid and them out in my face. How do i deal with this situation, can i just let them be till they die or will they continue to reproduce forever on the inside of the bin😂😂. Also by any chance have i made a BSF composter accidentally, do all fly larvae aid in decomposition, i heard also the insect exoskeletons can increase the chitin content of the compost and improve it's quality.

Let me know what you think i should do.

Update: i checked one of my older posts , it's actually been less than a month😂😂

Thanks!

As someone who has composted for 10+ years, and gone from a market that all shop bought compost was peat to then peat free, I recognize that (at least in my experience) peat compost is better for plants than peat free (not that I'm particularly impressed by shop bought compost).

All I understand is that peat free is better for the environment, and that is a good enough reason for me to not use it. Especially since I am now at a point where I do not have to buy compost anymore as I make enough of my own.

My question is, what does peat even do in compost? Is it effectively browns? So when making compost at home your browns are just what replaced peat?

I understand all about the environmental harm of using peat, but I understand little about what it does in compost. Was just hoping for some info/ people's personal experience.

We don’t drink a lot of coffee or tea at home and I need more greens in my pile. Struck a deal with HR and Facilities to put this bin here for coffee grounds from the coffee alert next to it. As long as I keep it clean and bug free, they’ve let me have this spot.

Hey folks! I recently bought a house that has a lawn that is almost certainly lead contaminated. It's also just a sad lawn with no ecological diversity and probably pretty poor soil, with a gigantic 100 year old norway maple in the middle of it. I am interested in sheet composting the lawn to bury the lead soil under a pretty deep layer of more healthy soil. However reading about it, I am a little worried that it might cause our backyard to become a habitat that is delightful for rats (it's in the Greater Boston area and apparently there are occasional rats in the area). I was wondering if any of you have experience with sheet composting in a semi-urban area and if you ever had trouble with unwanted wildlife. Also, what do you guys think about composting over a Norway Maple? I have heard they don't like getting a bunch of extra soil put on top of them, but I also think she might like having more soil nutrients :-) I know she's not a native tree but she's ours and we need to take good care of her!

Compost just hit 120° after adding coffee grounds and chaff along with turning it twice. Just curious if anyone else uses coffee grounds or chaff and what percentage you keep it at? I don’t want to put too much in. I can pick up 50 gallons daily from the local roaster so I’d like to keep adding but don’t want to get carried away! Just for reference my pile is about 350 gallons

I have this spot in the backyard that I think used to be a garden but is just overgrown now. It gets a good amount of poison ivy on one side, for now. Can I pile up compost on it and the heat will kill off the poison ivy or will it just grow out of control?

Living in the UK, about a 2 years ago we started to compost into a small 80L black waste bin in our back garden that I'd drilled some holes into on the side and the bottom. It mainly took the waste food from the house and cardboard from deliveries that I'd rip up into pieces and chuck inside. This turned into 2 bins, then 3 and then 4 all the while having 1 empty bin to turn the oldest into and so on. However we've never seen much in the way of heat coming from any of the bins, they do kind of break stuff down but just takes abit longer than youtube videos suggest.

Having read online that it was likely the size of the compost pile that was holding us back, this past autumn I got my hands on some spare pallets from work and made a compost bin near where we are likely to attempt to grow some fruit/veg and dumped the 4 bins into it, only for them collectively to barely take up any real space in the new bin.

I gathered alot of boxes and paper from work and shredded them, picked up leaves from the neighbourhood and put in alot of the garden waste while clearing up the boarders etc. I also popped into a local star bucks and came away with alot of used coffee grounds afew times over the weeks and dumped all into the compost pile and gave it a good mix. It's usually kept covered with afew sheets of cardboard and a plastic sheeting to keep the rain off and generally feels damp to the touch, but still haven't seen anything go over 10-15⁰c over the winter, even with turning it once a week, far from the 50-60⁰c (130-140⁰F) others showcase.

I believe there's a fairly good mix of browns to greens overall, so is it just down to the ambient temperature as it just doesn't seem to want to kick start.

Is there anything that can be done, aside from pissing on it, or is it simply a case of waiting afew months until things warm up and things come back to life in the spring and check on it then?

A positive sign that my compost heap here in southern New England is steaming through an atypically cold (for these days) winter. Despite weeks of hard freeze to start the year, my pile has sloughed off an overnight cloak of snow quite nicely. I start each fall with a massive amount of leaves, which I layer with weekly insertions of food scraps from my kitchen and the neighbors, spent coffee grounds from the local coffee shop, washtubs of alpaca poo manure from the town’s educational farm, plus loads of salt marsh hay and seaweed brought home from the nearby beach.  Each time I fluff up the heap, I borrow shavings of leaves from the front and back, cleaved like shawarma from a spit, and of course dank with regular dousings of pee. Composting is such a fun hobby and passion project, I wrote a whole book about it. Pardon the self-promotion, but here’s a link to a review, in case you are curious: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/scott-russell-smith/on-compost/

https://preview.redd.it/cfhkjrptqyge1.jpg?width=480&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=33d0d5839aae5ed7508596833326dfd3b7f9cd93

Hello! I wanted to ask what methods you use to reduce the temperature in summer in your vermicomposters. I keep it closed all year round, it is domestic, I have it located in an interior patio of the residential building. I am in Barcelona, ​​in a Mediterranean climate, but the summers are increasingly longer and with higher temperatures. Thank you!

I've been lurking this sub for a while and have gathered that rabbit poop is great for compost. However everyone who's asked about it so far seems to own their own rabbits.

I currently live in the suburbs and there are wild rabbits that live nearby, pooping in my backyard everyday. I'd like to ask you all if there are any problems or caveats to putting this poop in my compost. Would wild rabbits have any diseases or parasites that would make this a bad idea?

Hi folks, trying my hand at composting for the second time and coming to the experts (Reddit) for advice. Let me set the scene, and please chime in with suggestions!

The Scene:

• I live in a townhouse in residential Atlanta, GA. We have a ~10ftx20ft second floor deck/patio/balcony/whatever you want to call it, on which I do rail planters and potted plants every year.
• Below the deck (ground level) is a small outdoor area which has a concrete pad, with about 25sq ft of dirt to one side. Nothing really grows down there because it’s shaded by the deck and nearby trees, and gets almost no direct sun.
• I cook a lot so we have a lot of vegetable scraps (1-2 gallons/week). I also buy cut flowers regularly, so have a vase-full or two of dead flowers every couple of weeks. We also have a semi-steady supply of cardboard.
• I have a Lomi (I know, I know, but hear me out!)
• I tried a tumbler last year and failed miserably. It could be a combo of ratio issues + not cutting dead flowers into small enough pieces, but basically everything just rotted in place (yes I tumbled it regularly). The tumbler was also on the upper patio and took up a lot of space.
• This year I am adding 18”x24”x12” raised planters to grow vegetables, and am planning to add worms to the planters to help out
• All in all, I don’t necessarily need to produce a ton of compost, just some good stuff to supplement my planters and feed the the vegetable plants 😁

So, my questions are:

• Should I try the tumbler again (advice welcome), or would it be better to do a bin/pile sitting on the dirt downstairs?
• Back to the silly Lomi, is it worth running it to speed up composting in whichever route I end up with? And/or can I use it to process scraps into food for the worms? (sprinkle on the surfaces vegetable planters)
• When people talk about shredding cardboard to put in the compost, are we talking run it thru a paper shredder, or just rip it up into something like 2”x10” strips?

Thanks for helping a novice get this figured out!

I'm building multiple in-ground flower beds and replacing major sections of my lawn. I have Saint Augustine grass and live in Florida, zone 10a. I don't plan on planting anything in these flower beds for a few seasons so that stuff can compost properly.

If I dig 2 feet deep for compost trenching, can I lay the sod I remove upside down along the bottom of the trench to prevent reqrowth and provide a valuable nitrogen source? What should I add, if anything, to help break it down? Just don't want a potential matted mess when digging later.

I've been collecting and shredding palm fronds and dead branches (Everything is cut down into 1" strips) to add to my trenches. Is it better to just dump large piles of plant stuff into my trench and cover it with dirt, or lasagna layer thinner layers of plant stuff with dirt? My husband doesn't like the hugelkultur look of a large mound that shrinks over time, so I'm trying to keep my flower beds somewhat level.

We're laying down 4 inches of wood chips as mulch over the flower beds. If my compost trenches do collapse and sink a bit, should I move the mulch and add more plant material or top soil?

Should I use a spading fork and poke into my finished compost trenches to add air, or just leave them alone? I don't plan on turning the piles in any way.

I don't have any worms in my lawn. It's a new development with horrid fill dirt as soil. I only have millipedes and grubs in my top inch of soil. Should I add worms (probably red wigglers) or will the bugs I have now compost fine without any extra help?

Thanks for the assistance. This is a lot of work, and just want to make sure I'm doing this right.

Apparently the best way to tell grubs apart is by looking at the pattern of hairs on their butts.

Pretty new at composting and figured to put stuff in my bin and wait. Specifically looking for when is it ready to use? If I will use it this Spring should I stop adding greens, or when? The whole peeing thing is great and could be addressed as well.