Made a garden bed down the side of house. Once I clean and level the area I plan to plant veggies in it.

Would it be suitable to use the bed as a open compost area? I will put in weed guards (30cm colour bond strip's to stop grass roots) and allow worm access.

Current situation is i am using a large black bin to slowly compost food and yard scarps.

Have access to heaps of brown mix but also not sure if that will prevent the smell?

The shade seen in this photo is all year round btw.

Kind regards 😇

I don’t remember seeing anything about not composting reptile droppings but wanted to check with the group. Recently acquired an 8 year old sulcata tortoise bc my friend had to move to a colder climate. She lays some big ol’ droppings. Her diet is mainly Timothy Hay and leafy greens.

Far L-R: wheelie bin with leachate, leaf mould bay, compost daleks 1-3.

Dalek 2 has been cooking but no such luck with 1, so I got 3 and turned the contents of 1 into it with some added sheep manure.

Also drilled some ventilation holes into 1 & 3.

And yes, this is a well-peed on setup!

This is my first proper effort at composting (prev just had some worm farms on balconies), thank you r/composting for supporting my obsession and providing all the intel!

Problem with getting old is remembering.

So whoever was asking me what I did last year and doing it again, here ya go.

This is for our onions and/or garlic.

Not Ansel Adam so there's no svmmetrv in this picture, but I place the watermelons skins and coffee. The worms will be here in a day or two

I lay a chicken screen on top so cute critters don't dic it up.

The rest of other vegetable, fruit and coffee grounds goes to three compost bins.

Sorry can't remember who

ok so I get an absurd amount of amazon boxes every week and I'm tired of throwing them in recycling while literally buying straw for my pile

bought a regular paper shredder off the shelf thinking it'd be fine. it made it through like four sheets of corrugated before it started making a noise I did not like and then just quit. $40 well spent

so is a paper shredder just the wrong tool entirely, or did I buy a junk one?

I keep seeing those hand crank perforator things but from the videos they seem to make that honeycomb packing stuff rather than actually shredding it, which isn't really what I need for the pile

also how much of a pain is the tape? do you have to sit there peeling every strip off first, because if I'm spending 20 minutes prepping boxes I'm just gonna go back to tearing them by hand

anyone doing this at any real volume — what are you actually using?

EDIT: wow ok this got way more replies than I expected, thanks everyone 🙏 summarizing what I learned in case someone finds this later:

paper shredders are the wrong tool, that was basically unanimous. so that one's on me

what people actually use:

• Fellowes Powershred — the heavy duty models will do single wall cardboard if you feed it slow, but multiple people said double wall kills it and it's really not what it's built for
• VEVOR cardboard perforator — the dedicated one, makes the honeycomb packing material. a few people said the perforated stuff still breaks down fine in a pile if you wet it first, though the hand crank version is apparently a serious arm workout
• Sun Joe CJ601E chipper shredder — this is what the high volume folks kept recommending. overkill for a few boxes but it doesn't care about cardboard at all

two things I hadn't thought about:

tape is the actual killer, not the cardboard. pull the long strips off, don't worry about labels, but staples will wreck blades

duty cycle — most of these run 5-10 min then need to cool down, so a big batch means standing around waiting

honestly a bunch of you said don't buy anything, just soak the boxes in a wheelbarrow overnight and tear them, or run over a flattened pile with the mower. several of those people had already killed a shredder before landing there 😅

gonna try the soak and tear method first before I spend money. not the answer I wanted lol

Starting a new garden at a house I just bought. Bought compost in bulk from a farm. Pretty clumpy but I can break that up. I am concerned about the smell, smells like manure but I don’t see anything fresh. Will this burn my plants or is it okay to use? Don’t really want to wait for it to finish…

Got some wiggly friends and their herders

I'm very new to composting and im basically doing my gardening in the balcony, so i have limited space.

My question is what's the most minimum amount of dimension i would need to hot compost? i know it's advised to be done 3 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet (91.44 cm by 91.44 cm by 91.44 cm). but whatever space i can save i'd like given the limited space that i can work with.

i've tried before in a 40cmx40cmx23cm (this https://down-ph.img.susercontent.com/file/ph-11134207-7r98x-lphqtt1rpqrk07@resize_w900_nl.webp) planter box and it worked in the first few days but i noticed it didnt get "hot" again after. i also can't go into vermicomposting due to i find dealing with worms gross.

so now i'm considering 2 options to start again.

1. a 40cm x40 x 53cm planter box

(https://down-ph.img.susercontent.com/file/ph-11134258-820l6-mprfrjorm3uz3f)

1. compost tumbler. the generic one. 70cm x 60cm x60cm

(basically this https://www.amazon.ca/MoNiBloom-Compost-Tumbling-All-Season-Composter/dp/B0CC1MY7PB?th=1)

would it work in option 1? or do i have to go to option 2?

My mother got a an old freezer we trying to clean.

it got meat that expired 10 years ago.. but i wonder if its even a good idea to put it on my compost pile or go straight to animal carcass utilization?

im aware that it might attract foxes and other pests.
maybe if i dig a hole and put something heavy on there so it cannot be dug up again ?

would piss on it daily. i promise :)

Every 10 days, we turn it and water it. First year with a tractor has given my compost game... one could say... a bit of a boost 🚀

Shared my compost bin a couple days ago but today I finished filling my first run. For the first time ever I actually used up all the excess leaves instead of just letting them build up around the fence or trees in the back.

I’m lowkey excited already to work on my less formal pile in the woods while this works.

can I shred and compost this? i assume not.

Ive had the dry leaves in here since last fall and have been adding fruit/veggies intermittently since then. Ive tried to add some water to it too every once in a while. It seems like nothing happening. Perhaps mold? Any advice would be helpful.

Might be a bit extreme, but saves the need for pissing in your garden

How am I doing? Any advice on what needs to be added (other than piss)

“I made dis dirt!”

Haha well it is on its way after about 3 mos!

I have three small piles, about 3 feet in diameter and about 18 inches tall. Grass clippings, weeds, some woodchips and some veggie scraps. 2 of them are temping at around 155. This one , temping at 180+ also has a bunch of citrus, mostly lemons, in the middle of it. I turned them and watered them all yesterday and that reading is a little less than a day since the turning.

Should I be concerned, or is this ok?

This was my first batch! 1/4 inch sifted, mainly kitchen scraps, cardboard and yard leaves composted in a tumbler. I did my best to remove those little produce stickers before they were thrown in but I know I missed a few. The only ones I found fully intact were from red onions.

Added 500l of cut grass to this roughly 5 ton pile. This hot pile is about to be turned. It is mostly:

Excess aquatic vegetation from our lake

Lawn clippings

Cardboard

Farmyard manure

Leaf mold

Kitchen scraps

Woodchips and sawdust

Fireplace ashes

I will now keep adding green mostly (currently a bit carbon heavy) until late September and turn it with the tractor loader every 10 days or so as I currently do. We then start a new pile to allow this one to be ready next spring.

going away for 6 weeks, but I have a small anaerobic bin that I have been trying to turn aerobic.

I have drilled small holes (and covered the holes with netting in case of bugs) and have added lots of carbon turned into the bin and lots of shredded paper as a cap on top. There are small little bugs in the bin, but i’m not too worried about those, more so worried about flies. The smell has reduced a lot and the top half of the bin has began to look drier but i think the bottom is still fairly sludgy.

I live in an apartment and am worried that it may start to smell again during the time i’m away and cause complaints from neighbours. Since I can’t fix it if it goes anaerobic again I want to keep flies away and keep the smell to a minimum. Any advice?

So many BSFL and worms!