UKC

Morning all gardeners and composters.

I have been thinking about  composting for a while for two reasons 1. to save time going to the tip with the green waste and 2. to have a nice supply of fresh compost on demand coupled with the smug knowledge that I am recycling and making great use of my green waste.  The likely composition of the waste would be deciduous leaves in autumn, evergreen leaves and twigs from conifers, cotoneaster and pyracantha, laurel leaves and twigs from a hedge, other twigs and leaves from border plants and general trimmings, grass cuttings and household greenery waste including old flowers, fruit and veg waste.

I have been looking at various compost bins and there are a huge array from simple mesh crates to wooden boxes and plastic bins, plus worm composters.  The plastic bins seem to come in varies shapes and sizes including ones you can turn, ones enclosed at the bottom, some open and some which allow you to collect the moisture to use as plant feed.  Costs are anywhere from a few quid for plastic bag ones up to about £300 for the premium versions.

I guess my main concerns are whether the marketing stands up to scrutiny; do you get what you pay for, are the hot composters worth the money, do they actually create the compost they claim etc etc.

Do they actually work?

You beat me to a post.  Since lockdown I’ve been composting food waste and light garden waste in an old water butt with a flappy door cut in the base, and a load of rocks around the tap to collect liquid compost for draining out and use.  It’s far too slow and a bit fly ridden so I’ve been looking at an airated hot composter with proper sealing lid and access doors.

I’ll watch the thread with interest.

Check your local council website to see if you can get subsidised compost bins from them.  

Dad has a couple of the plastic ones, pretty basic but they seem to work.  

You might want to get a small kitchen compost bin, it needs emptying quite regularly in the summer.  One with a click lid helps keep flies out.  

Hotbin and Aerobin look good but pricey. The idea behind them makes sense but I dont want an expensive box in the garden which doesn't work.

I did this at the start of lockdown for many of the reasons stated by the OP. Still too early to get anything useful as it's quite big (360 litres I think). The kitchen bin needs emptying less and generally has less smell and mess, we simply put compostable items in an empty ice-cream tub and take it out when needed. There are flies when you lift the lid but it's at the end of the garden so it's never an issue. The one we ordered has a aeration base and side opening to access the compost when it's ready. It was about £25 with delivery.

I run a few composters at the allotment.  Cheap basic dalek types are great for 'standard' composting - a mixture of fruit and veg waste, paper and cardboard, grass (but not too much unless you're balancing it with a lot of paper, or it'll all go squidgy).  They work pretty quickly and give you decent enough compost.

The harder to compost material - leaves, woody stems, evergreen trimmings, and pernicious weeds like bindweed - go in a bog standard plastic bin kept in a spot that gets full sunlight.  As this fills up I add liberal quantities of the liquid compost accelerant that we humans produce on a daily basis..!  This bin takes a lot longer to compost - six months or more - but what comes out is an incredibly rich soil improver.  

What volume of green waste are you producing and can you fit it all in? I've taken 3 tonne bags to the public green waste tip in the past month and that's from a 12x12m garden that's 50% lawn with no hedges.  Add to that a dustbin of kitchen green waste to my mate's compost heap.  If you're doing woody stuff* you need a shredder otherwise the big woody bits stop you getting the compost out the bin.  You also need to consider nuisance weeds - if you can't get your composter hot enough you won't kill the seeds off.  We have horsetails in our lawn and a wild field next door so weeds are a big potential problem for us - which is why my green waste goes to the public site and not my mate's heap.

*even tall flowers won't break down enough.

four old pallets make a box line with mesh to stop stuff falling out.

It's not quick, but it's cheap, my was up to 68C at one point.

PS I also have a shreader

A friend of mine who is a keen gardener has one of the hot ones and she seems delighted with it; she regularly posts pictures of its thermometer showing how hot it gets.

We've just got a bog-standard cheap box from Argos that gets full sunlight and we water it occasionally to stop it drying out. Seems to be working albeit slowly. We get a lot of leaves in our garden as we live next to some very big trees.

Does it actually accelerate the composting process, or just improve the nitrogen content of the result?

We simply have a few sheets of wriggly tin sheeting forming a couple of bays in the corner of the veg patch. The plastic composters should work much quicker as they heat up over the summer. I'd keep well away from the wormeries, they never seem to work and you'll get a couple of litres of liquid compost, a bit of solid compost and and expensive box full of dead worms unless you want them to live in your house through the winter.

How big is your garden?

The best choice of composters will probably depend on how much green waste you generate each year in addition to the kitchen compostables.

I have a 70ft garden with a lot of beds, a small bit of lawn, a veg plot and not much hedging and it easily fills a 1 metre cubed wooden compost box each year.  I have two of these boxes so I rotate these each year to give time for the previous year's waste to break down.  Cost about £100 each from Screwfix.

I've thought about getting one of the plastic tumble hot composters to get something more instant from kitchen waste and grass cuttings, so would also be interested to hear any experiences with them. 

I initially assumed that this thread was going to be an homage to Charlie Dimmock from back in the day...

I'm bought a Hot bin last June and used it last summer, but it has been out of use this year due to ongoing building work and needing to relocate it.

I had mixed success with it, and am definietly on a learning curve.  I was using it to compost food waste, dog poo and all garden waste, including perennial weeds, but not stuff that couldn't be cut up with secuters.

What I've learnt so far...

It needs a steady supply of shredded paper

I need to purchase a shredder (even the smallish woody stuff and more fibrous plants didn't rot down enough

Don't stack egg shells inside each other and then put them in the food waste. 

The more grass cuttings you can get the better...they are great for hotting it up, and it's exciting watching it achieve 70+C in only 24hours.

You can save a fortune on plant food by draining off the liquid (mine has a valve on the base for this).

Emptying it is a bit of a nightmare, as partially emptying it is near impossible (the top stuff collapses into the space left from what has just been removed) so you end up having to empty on to a sheet and reload the newest stuff.

It's like having your own science project in the garden.

My 'land' as it were is spread across three distinct areas but it produces loads of hedge trimmings, grass clippings, and border maintenance plus we generate lots of green kitchen waste from eating veggies and fruit.  We also have loads of cardboard which we could add and lot of brown waste.  Goodness knows how much over the year but we would need something to work quickly.

Apparently both.  I do put some in the regular composters as well, but most of it goes in the hot bin.

As an added bonus, it probably saves two or three loo flushes a day!

We've a basic black plastic one with an open bottom like a large black bin.  It's tapered towards the top so the compost slides down over time rather than wedging.  It's massively more productive than the 4 pallets version I had before and effortlessly turns everything into compost.  It's also the most wormy thing I've every seen.  Where the worms came from I don't know. It took about 6 months to get going.  In the summer it eats the compostible waste of three people faster than we can fill  it up.  It eats grass, soft branches (and thorny rose) , leaves, egg boxes and vegetable waste.  No non veg or cooked food and no citrus (former because of rats, latter because it stinks). In winter it does fill up mainly because we don't tend to take compost out. Eggshells, avocado shells and nuts and mature wood sticks >1" diameter make it through but they just go back in the top for another round.

I think it was free from the council - certainly nothing fancy or expensive - not an item of great beauty though.

Don't put twigs into a domestic compost heap unless you're happy to leave it for several years. The temperature doesn't get high enough to break the wood down quickly. Also avoid putting stuff like dandelion roots in as well. They don't break down and will start growing again when you put the compost back on the garden. Municipal compost heaps can deal with this stuff because they heat up to over 60 Deg C due to their volume. Domestic ones don't.

There's an optimum ratio of green to brown waste for compost heaps. I can't quite remember what it is but Google is your friend.

I stick my (vegetarian) food waste on the compost heap. I turn it over with a fork once a week to speed up decomposition and that seems to work reasonably well. I have two heaps which allows me to empty one every Autumn when I mulch the garden.

Beware also of composting stuff like ivy. Again it won't break down properly and will grow again when you spread it.

I put Autumn leaves in bin bags with a few holes in them. Tie the top and leave them in a corner outside and they'll have rotted down in time for the following Autumn.

I don't know about hot composters.

The dalek type, or a metal version such as I had on my first allotment are slow but absorb an astonishing amount of stuff. I try to alternate brown, leafy stuff with green stuff and kitchen peelings, and keep out the nastier weeds or any but the thinnest twigs. When the windfall pears go in the fruit flies swarm, but they are harmless and die away soon enough. I enjoy attacking the top layer with a spade edge, cutting stuff up and pushing it all down.

A mistake I have made in one of my open wooden containers, which I filled with horse poo, is not to seal the sides with some kind of membrane. There was one, but it was shredded and I didn't bother to fix it. Now a mole lives in there and keeps chucking huge amounts on lovely stuff all around the sides. I know how Canute felt. Tomorrow, there will be a reckoning.

I've had a couple of the basic plastic jobbies I've half halfheartedly filled with green and small brown garden waste, emptying occasionally from the bottom. Things have got much more productive since getting more conscientious hiking the kitchen waste up to the top of the garden instead of using the council collection. More variety, more moisture. Dunno about the hot versions sorry.

Noooooooooooo.  Even then she was awful. Nowadays I won't watch garden rescue.  Frances Tophill on the other hand... phwoooar.

I got my other half a Hotbin at the start of lockdown. Like others have said still to early to say what the resultant compost is like but she’s really happy with it and it seems to be reaching the right temperature.

Our garden is tiny so it a bonus that it looks ok for me.  

Misreading it as "Hot posters" I thought something different too ...

I nearly said similar. 

Have you seen her now, not so hot, but a lovely personality.

I've always found her to be too brash (obviously never met her so that's my impression from the telly).  I prefer Rachel de Thame and Frances Tophill's more demure demeanor.