Alternatives to Worm Composting

In recent years I’ve been living in the country and therefore am able to experiment with outdoor composting. I can’t say that I’ve come to any solid conclusions yet, but some thoughts and comparison might be useful.

Based on some guidelines I found on the internet, I built a compost bin with some old wooden pallets.

I wired them together, then we built a lid with some old plywood.

It was convenient for actually mixing or taking soil out. I just unwired the front pallet and could shovel directly into a wheel barrow.

However overall it hasn’t been a big success. Firstly it’s a bit of an eyesore, so you would want to have somewhere to hide it in your garden. And the openings were big enough that animals sometimes pulled scraps out. If I would build it again I think I would line the inside with fine mesh chicken wire. And overall it seemed too large given the amount of table scraps two people can produce.

Lately I’ve turned to using this big bin for storing soil, leaves etc. And my main composting is going on in two of the more standard black plastic compost bins. (About $30 at hardware store) They are a good size for composting table scraps. Raccoons were having a field day climbing in until I rigged up bungee cords to hold the lid down.

However I still have a bin of worms in the basement. It is difficult to decide whether I should completely switch to outdoor composting. The compost produced by the worms seems much more potent, but the labor of harvesting is not very appealing. Currently I’m trying to get the best of both worlds – in the spring and periodically in the summer I dump a portion of the worm bin into the outdoor composter. The worms seem to survive there for the summer, and I expect the accelerate the composting process. Meanwhile I keep adding more paper to the worm bin inside, and let it go all winter so that it really full of castings by the next spring. I have two containers for scraps – a small one I fill with the “best” stuff for the worm bin and everything else I dump outside.

Now that we have a big garden and lawn, the amount of compost we could use is pretty much unlimited, and kind of makes the output of the worm bin seems pretty insignificant. Even with the outdoor bins, and all the material of grass clippings, leaves, seaweed etc that I compost, I still expect I will need to buy some manure or other compost from time to time. So these notes are very much preliminary, I’ll hopefully have more tips and experiences to describe in the coming years….