Bins for Your Piles
Store-Bought Bins
Yes, our store-bought bin is a little crunched from overuse. (I'll fix it when I empty it... or maybe not). You can buy one of these plastic bins from Canadian Tire, Rona, or your municipality.
We suggest you download a really useful PDF from the MetroVancouver website on how to get your store-bought bin producing compost. The PDF is called Here's the Dirt: Backyard Composting.
Here's the link:
http://www.metrovancouver.org/services/solidwaste/Residents/composting/Pages/default.aspx
Just a Big Pile
Unsightly, but pretty efficient nonetheless. When your veggies are harvested and their inedible bits are spent, just dig them up and throw them into a pile where they'll decay in Nature's good time.
To further heat up the pile & speed up the composting process, you can cover the mound with black plastic.
If you start your pile in the fall & leave it to simmer until spring, you'll have some good compost when you start your garden again in earnest
Little Problems in Your Piles?
Fruit Flies? After you add a layer of kitchen scraps containing fruit & veggie bits, cover then with a layer of soil mixed with a few handfuls of dolomite lime.
Bad Smells? You haven't put meat or dairy waste in your bin, have you? No? Then your compost probably needs more brown matter & more air. It probably needs to be turned, too. Stick a rake handle or pole down into your compost and work it around till you make a big hole. Do that a number of times to make air channels in your compost. This should help.
Raccoons? Yikes. Clever critters. Again, dolomite lime and soil on your veggie scraps will help, as will a good lid with boards close enough together to keep out greedy, clever fingers.
Home-Made Enclosures
You can build a simple double bin easily. Plans abound on the internet. Just Google "building a compost bin" and you'll get tons of sites with plans.
We suggest that you don't worry too much about making it rodent proof. Just don't throw any meat products, cooked food or egg shells into your bin, layer brown & green and keep the contents moist. You shouldn't really have any significant rodent problems.
And if a mouse makes a nest in your compost, waddaya gonna do? They gotta eat, too.
Trench Composting
The vegetable graveyard. We do this all the time. After all, there's only so much stuff you can smush into your compost bin. And as you can see above left on this page, we broke ours.
Basically, a trench compost is a big pile of green and/or brown stuff buried underground.
Dig a trench about 30-45 cm (1-1.5 feet) deep in your garden where you want to build up your soil & add more nutrients to it. Or perhaps you just want to make a place to turf your kitchen scraps.
Shovel your stems, leaves, kitchen scraps and even corn stalks into the trench and chop them up with a spade. Cover the material with soil and it will start to decay, adding nutrients and beneficial microbial activity to your good earth.
Trenchin'
