Dear Covered Bridge Organic,

I filled both composters with yard thatch.  We had about 40 cubic feet to start with combined with 10 cubic feet of wet leaves. We added small amounts of kitchen vegetable waste each week. Here in El Paso , Texas , we have a cool enough winter that the grass does not need mowing from mid-November to early-March.

Across the winter, nights often get to mid-30's and occasionally to the teens.  Winter days run from mid-40's to low 60's.  I noticed that by early-February, the contents had compacted/composted down to about 60% full.  As the weather warmed up (our days are now about 80) the composing noticeably accelerated.  I've added about another 40 cubic feet of lawn clippings since March 1st.  To date we have sent no yard waste to the landfill. Yay!!!.

I stir both composters with a pitchfork about every 10 days in winter and every 5 days from March 1st. El Paso gets 8" of rainfall per year.  We are at 3,500' so the climate is "high desert" which means very dry, a bit less hot (than further north places like Phoenix and Tucson ) and with cool nights.  Hence, I water about once every 5 to 10 days, hose full blast until I see water running out of the air vents... about 4 minutes per bin.  My guess is that I add about 40 gallons per bin.

Our bins are located in a small fenced in utility area to the south side of the house.  They are about 23' from the side of the house.  Never had a noxious odor problem - just a puff when the lid is removed and it is not as nice as aftershave, but not bad at all.  We see lots of tiny bugs (look like no-see-ums) flying around inside but they don't leave the bins.  We see lots of bugs creeping through the clippings just doing their part of the process. The bins get about 6 hours of direct sun in the summer and 4 hours in the winter.

I've pulled out and used about 5 cubic feet of compost, which was the entire finished production from one bin – we added the initial 18 cubic feet in November and then added no further to one bin.  This weekend I plan to move the best compost from our full bin to what has become our "finished product bin".  Much of what is in our "starting bin" is already well-composted and I would estimate we have another 10 cf of ready compost.  I used the 5 cubic feet compost to till into the small garden you can see in the photo.  The next batch will be used as a kind of mulch over the garden to hold moisture.  If we have enough I plan to use the remainder to repair some bad spots on the lawn.  We haven't tried any composting accelerators and it seems that our balance of input capacity and output demand is about in-balance.  If we had bought a single bin, I would probably try an accelerator.

We haven't saved any money as our trash pick up is a part of the water and sewer bill.  As mentioned in my opinions entry, If all goes well I'll try to get our eco-czar interested in a city-wide program.Composting has saved us some effort in that lawn clippings are easily dumped into the bin. We are saved the bagging and carting the bags to the curb.  We also add leaves that are blown into the pool and picked up by the filters - mostly palm fronds.  We added maybe 4 cubic feet of these since November, and another 5 cubic feet of plant trimmings.

Our experience has been challenge-free.  I initially located the bins in the back corner of our lot, but moved them in February to the spot near the garden, which is a major point of compost use, and is much handier for dumping lawn clippings. The design seems about perfect to me; capacity, performance, ruggedness, and price.  I plan to drill center holes in the lids as you have done with your latest design.  To me, having two bins has been very handy in managing inputs and outputs and you might try a stronger suggestion of this in your marketing - I think most people will be happier with two bins.

Advice would be to try it as I'm fairly sure that most users will see a very nice benefit for a reasonable expense.  It just feels good to be doing something that benefits the ecology.  Our 12 year old is fairly stoked about that too. 

 

Happy Composting,

Rick