Tumbling Or Standing Compost Bin For Yard Waste?
I would like to start making compost at home. Looking on the web I learned that there are several options, the "standing"ones and the "tumbling" ones, which are more expensive and smaller, but seem quicker at producing compost and easier to operate. I have a relatively small yard, but my 4 recycling bins are always full. I would like to find an environmental friendly solution to this problem. I would appreciate your opinion. Thank you!
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I have a bin and a tumbler and I much prefer the tumbler. I also have a small yard in the suburbs.
What you use will be very much a function of where you live. In the city you dont have room or need a big freeform pile that is the cheapest method, also you may have concerns about attracting rodents or wildlife (I even heard some cities require compost piles to be enclosed).
You don’t HAVE to grind up the stuff for the tumbler, if you don’t it just won’t be as fast as it could be, but it’ll still be faster than if you put that same junk in just a bin.
My bin takes around a year to produce good compost, my tumbled around 2 months, with the same stuff tossed in each. The tumbler can also be moved, the bin is open on the bottom and cannot be moved.
both are good, i have a standing one and it works good. what i would do is make it in layers, i.e. food/scraps, then water, then food, then water and that would make it rot and into dirst quicker…. i would probably add some dirt into it as well, it may help.
BS that the spinners produce more and quicker. I spend alot of money on a spinner and it was a pain in the …. I also had a standing compost bin and there was no comparison between the two. The standing bin won hands down. With the spinner, you have to constantly monitor the moisture, you have to break everything down into small pieces if you really want fast compost. As the bin gets full, it gets harder and harder to turn plus you have to remember to crank the devil all the time. In your standing bin, mother nature and the insects and bacteria do most of the work. It is cheaper, easier to use, and the bugs and worms have access to the compost to help break it up. Worms are not happy in a spinner. I sold mine the year after I tried it and have never thought about purchasing another.
We have one of each and neither of them seem to be of much use except taking up space.
I have a tumbling one and it;s cheaper
and it works great.
Compost must be stirred. The tumbling bins take nearly all the work out of that chore but, as you noticed, the convenience comes at a price. If you don’t mind the work and exercise you should go for the standing bin. If you don’t like or can’t do quite strenuous physical work, go for the tumbler.
Bert
How much exercise can you use? The cheapest, easiest, and
potentially one of the fastest ways to compost is with a heap
on the ground — you must keep it watered and turned so it gets adequate oxygen and moisture to the center of the pile. Easiest way, imo, is to fork it from one pile to the next and then back to the first pile the following week– excellent for upper body strength. It’s usually a 5-10 minute workout.
If it’s just kitchen scraps you’re composting most of the time, I think a worm bin is probably the easiest method. Or if you’ve got a garden, dig a trench between a couple of rows and start throwing in the kitchen scraps at one end of the trench, covering
as you go. When you run out of one trench, dig another in the next row. When you plant next spring, the stuff in the trench will be fairly well decomposed. This does not, however, give you a way of disposing of diseased plant material… that needs to be tossed in the trash, burned, or hot-composted (which requires about a cubic meter of material).
The little rotary tumblers I’ve seen have been faster at composting than standing, unturned compost in bins.
Check with your local trash/recycling office at city or county level; they often offer tumbler-type composters for a much reduced price, if that interests you; many also run composting workshops fairly regularly.