Perhaps part of the problem is that I have a smaller yard than many may have. Ottawa back yards tend to be postage stamp size. I don't know if the neighbours would take to kindly to a big exposed pile of compost. However, I think I may try out the spare garbage can once my compost bin freezes shut.
Do the worm composting thing for kitchen waste which really aren't that much. Then you have trout worms to go fishing with or sell them to your fishing friends. We don't compost at the cabin asa don't want to attract bears ( both black and brown). So stuff that doesn't compost well gets burnt and the rest goes to worms. May start composting outside but it would have to be stuff that won't attract bears, leaves and green stuff.
This is my story too. I have two bins (one is never enough for us, as we like to fill one bin and let the compost finish while we're filling the other. So I always empty one bin by the end of the autumn and fill it up during the winter. I have the same problem of the lid freezing shut, but usually if there's a sunny day it'll thaw enough that I can open it up. Last winter we had a long cloudy cold stretch and I resorted to putting the compost in plastic bags in a garbage can outdoors, figuring I'd wait til a thaw to put it into the composter. That worked okay except that the garbage can was plastic and a squirrel nibbled through the lid to get at whatever it was smelling inside (I never have problems with animals getting into my compost bins in summer or winter, so this was a surprise).Originally Posted by Spidey
When I first moved to the city after 10 years in rural Vermont I couldn't get used to throwing out food scraps but we were in a second-floor apartment with no place to put a compost bin on the little balcony. So I spent way too much money and bought a fancy electric indoor composter. The website had all these testimonials from customers saying how great it was and how it didn't smell at all, but ours stank up the place pretty quick every time we opened it up to put stuff in. At the end of the first month I opened the tray in the bottom to pull out my finished compost but all I found was a puddle of putrid black slime. I ended up taking the composter to the dump; I couldn't return it because once you have food in it the composter is considered hazardous waste. Three weeks after I got rid of it, I got a small envelope in the mail from the manufacturer saying that a crucial wire was missing from my composter, and I needed to install it to make it work properly. Too late! A very expensive lesson.
Last edited by brad; 2012-11-06 at 07:41 PM.
Hi:
Not much happens in the winter unless the pile is large enough, such that the core can keep going due to being insulated by all the material around it. I seem to achieve this size, as I empty each and every year around April/May. So without size, one needs enough containers to stockpile all the compost in a frozen state through the winter. Other tips: keep you composter in the sun, and insulate, perhaps with straw bales, which also make excellent mulch the next year.
As far as animals go, you wouldn't think squirrels and chipmunks could make off with an entire apple up a tree, but they can. I find apples all over the place. Good fun. Why do I, the notoriously frugal and tight hboy, have entire apples in the compost you ask? My wife teaches kindergarten. The average 5 year old doesn't eat a whole (or even half) apple, and a good number of them don't eat any of an apple.
hboy43
So many sailboats, so little time.
Yeah, in my little bins there's no composting action whatsoever in winter: the whole pile freezes solid. I just add stuff on top throughout the winter and it doesn't start decomposing until the thaw. I usually throw a bit of dirt on top between layers to keep the smell down in early spring, otherwise it can get pretty rank with all that decomposition starting at once. I also turn the pile in the bins as soon as it thaws: mixing is important both to speed the process and to avoid anaerobic conditions that produce lots of methane. In full summer I can have finished compost in little more than a week if I mix it well: I put in a batch of table scraps, mix them in, and one week later they're fully processed. I can usually get at least two or three full bins of finished compost each summer, although my mix tends to be higher in nitrogen than carbon (I don't put in a lot of woody material, mainly because I don't have it -- I use a chipper to process fallen branches but that's about it).
Sure, we compost all winter. It basically becomes frozen food waste until spring.
Yes, we compost all winter.
We keep an old ice crem bucket in the corner of the counter. Once it is half full we take it out. If the composter lid is frozen, we try again in a few days, when the ice crem bin is almost full.
I save a bag of leaves in the fall in a garbage bag in the garage, and sprinkle a few inch layer of them on maybe once month.
The leaves speeds up the action when the spring comes. Otherwise the winter aditions are too wet to be appetizing for the worms.
Native worms in my composter just go dormant in the winter for me here in the GTA.
We had a warm spell over around Chistmas time , and I dug out the compost corkscrew, and yes, the worms were alive and busy in the lower layers.
The second composter in the back corner of the yard takes wheatever is not finished in the spring from the near back door one.
By the fall that is finshed in it, and the summer back door load goes to the back corner again to perc away all winter and leave capacity in the back door one.
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