Simple Composting Bin

Composting has many benefits. One of the first things you may notice is a reduction in your outgoing trash volume. If points were awarded for stewardship this is one of those places where you could earn one or a few. By reducing our outgoing trash we are sending less waste to landfills. Landfills certainly serve their purpose but why add to them any more than we need to?

But probably my favorite part about composting is turning what most people consider as waste into a valuable resource, rich garden soil. This can prove handy whether your growing marigolds or melons.

But to make composting an activity, a habit or a lifestyle for most people it's got to be simple. Those creative ideas that help the environment, produce something useful and don't take too much effort are great!

And going back to my favorite reason, I like composting because it helps support my backyard gardening habit in a number of ways. Beyond producing a soil enriching agent it gives me a handy place to put plant material that I need to remove from my garden whether it be weeds or plants that have finished their season or crops that didn't quite make it to the table. I also can't tell you how many tomatoes and squash and melons I've eaten that started as plants in and around my compost. I see those little familiar looking sprouts pop up and transplant them to my garden. It so much fun watching free and easy food grow. Much of my garden this year were what I refer to as accidentals. Of course, they are no accident. I count each one as a gift from God.

So, let's get to the business of building a compost bin. There are many resources available telling you much more about all the benefits and techniques. This is just one I stumbled across that I felt led to share with you today.

This first picture shows my existing compost bin that we have used the last couple of years but as you can see, it's full and needs a friend to help carry the load. So propped up against it is a fresh roll of what is universally called hardware cloth. It's not a fabric at all but rather a medium wire mesh. I bought this particular roll at Lowe's but I think I found about the same thing at Atwoods.

Remove the plastic and paper wrapper and you may find your roll is still held together with a thin bailing wire. One of the hardest parts can be finding the beginning of that little wire so you may end up doing what I did and cheat. This may be a good time to grab a pair of wire cutters. You're going to need them sooner or later anyway, the only tool you'll need for the whole project.

So cut and/or unwind the wire and the roll will start to loosen and open up a bit. By this point I should throw in the legal "make sure to wear gloves" because the wire ends can get a little pokey. I know this because I don't always follow the legal advice.

So save that extra wire. In fact, this might be a good time to use the wire cutters and go ahead and cut it up into pieces about 6 inches in length. Set them aside because you will need them soon.

This next part is when having a 2nd person should would be handy. By now you will notice the roll can be wound up pretty tight; more memory than I have left I can tell you that. I've done this by myself before and it's no fun. It can also take some time to get the roll loosened up. This time I thought I'd be smarter and employ a couple of cinder blocks. I walked the rest of the roll out trying to bend it flat with my boots. As you can see, Ladybug was absolutely no help at all.

So now I have my mesh back over where I intend to finish it up and install it. As you can see it rolled right back up tighter than Scrooge's hand on Christmas Eve. Plan ahead. Trick a buddy into coming over.

That first "stitch" can be hard when you are doing it all by yourself. Grab your buddy by the tail of his shirt and tell him you need him just a little bit longer. Somehow talk him into struggling the two ends together while you make your first tie. I have overlapped the two ends about 3 inches. This next part you can do as the Holy Spirit leads. I liked doing my stitches horizontally from one side of the overlap to the other. If the overlap is truly 3 inches and you cut the wire to a 6 inches you're not going to get much of a twist so keep all that in mind and adjust accordingly. By the way, if you don't have wire cutters but you have a handful of zip ties lying around you can make this a tool free project, if you don't mind all the little tails.

So patiently work your stitches down. I spaced mine about 3 inches apart. With the mesh being 36 inches high that would come to about 13 stitches which is probably enough.

When you get about halfway down flip the whole thing over and finish it that way.

Now that all of your metal wire stitches are done, and you've breathed a sigh of relief and stood up straight again it's time to clean up the extra wire. I set a little waste can on the ground and trimmed up all the extra tail on my twists.

One final step (no pun intended) that I don't show here is I turned the hoop horizontal for a moment, set it on the firm surface and stepped on the seam with my boots. This not only helps to flatten out the seam a bit but also bends the twist back down to reduce the risk of catching one with your hand someday.

Now that your done, you can enjoy the fruit of your labor. No real pomp remaining, you can just set it in place. I have used stakes before to keep it in place but found them pretty useless. As you can see I have two bins side by side now. There is a whole new technique of using two bins in a way to accelerate the composting process. There are many more resources available on line to describe this. This entry was just the 101 for today.

- Wade Baker