Compost Bins

-6* air temp, -18* wind chill at 8:45 am. A perfect morning for warming the house with a self-cleaning oven since I don’t need ot make bread today. I clean the oven only once or twice a year. Spills are wiped up but that’s about it unless it’s smoking. Ovens don’t get “dirty” easily anyway. The oven/stove is propane. It sucks up a lot of propane while it’s cleaning and it throws a lot of heat. I pick the coldest days of the year to clean it. By no coincidence this is when the oven is used most. I take out the shelves, vacuum the loose stuff at the bottom and let it go. Rack cleaning is warm weather job. I’ll take a rough sponge to the racks today but that won’t take all the heat-sealed deposits. For that, the racks spend the night on the grass. There’s an enzyme in dew that breaks down the deposits and leaves the racks shiny.

I add poultry manure, spent plants, kitchen waste, grass clippings, guinea pig and rabbit cage shavings, leaves, dead poultry, Sidney’s collection of dead critters left at the back door over night, and anything else I can get my hands on to the compost bins year round. My current bins are free pallets. They work well for small bins. I like to have three bins in a section with two going and one empty. I turn one bin into the empty bin and the other bin into the newly emptied bin. If I have to I can pull two pallets off one end and scoot them down to the other to make refilling a bin easier. Free and efficient – you can’t as for more than that.

Looking for bales old hay is on my list of things to do this week. Straw will be fine too. I’m going to build a slow compost bin with them. I’d like the bin to be a minimum of four bales wide x ten bales long x two bales high, something of respectable size. When I pull 50 broccoli plants, 25 cauliflower plants, 100′ of cucumber vines and 438 wheelbarrows full of weeds (let’s hope that weed number is a huge exaggeration and doesn’t turn into truth) I need a place for everything.

Don’t worry about anything you’ve ever read about weed seeds in hay. For this purpose it doesn’t matter. You’re starting with dirty, dusty, damp or otherwise compromised bales. After a year outside in the elements they’re going to be worse. When you’re going to turn the contents of one of these bins for the first time in the spring you’re going to use about half the bales. Set aside the better half of the bales. They have a new purpose. Cut the baling twine and mix it in. You’ll probably have to turn this a few times to get it finished. It won’t take long.

Start again with the next batch of ruined bales. Keep the bales you set aside from the previous year’s bin. These will e used when you’ve added so many greens to the pile that it starts to get smelly. If you don’t have leaves or other browns cover the pile with some of this old hay/straw.