I currently live in an urban apartment complex. I have a small compost pile in the wooded area on the side of a hill that no one even notices. I cover it with leaves. When I lived down the street in a house with a large back yard, I had a compost bin. I am an experienced composter.
The bin I had was a 4′ x 8′ rectangle. The sides were the height of 3 2″ x 12″ pieces of lumber. The bin was already there when we moved to the house. The 4′ x 8′ x 3′ rectangle shaped compost bin was open to the ground, and open to the sky. The eaves of a shed allowed the roof drip line on one side to drip into the bin.
In this one easy, simple bin, I composted all of the compostable paper that came into our home. At the time, my wife was a national sale manager for a major company, and worked from our home. We received countless shipping boxes and large amounts of mail that was all composted. In addition, I composted the neighbor’s daily newspaper, and thousands of bags of leaves from the neighborhood. In peak leaf season, I used a few neatly spaced and neatly kept woven wire chest-high circles like tomato cages only wider, and did some sheet composting.
For the green component – the nitrogen source – in this large home compost operation, I used (continue reading)