Backyard Composting — The Planning Lady

Nov 17

Nov 17 Backyard Composting

My first zero waste change was a fairly easy one. While living in the Twin Cities metro I was first introduced to composting. In Columbia Heights the City provided residents with a starter kit that consisted of a 5 gallon bucket, roll of large compost bags, and a few coupons. There was one central location for residents to drop off their compost and in the spring they sold cheap bags of the resulting compost soil. This method was a little smelly and messy because the compost usually began to break down and leak in the 5 gallon bucket before I had the chance to drop it off. Moving to Minneapolis was great because the City operated a composting program, supplying a small compost bin and picking it up on a weekly basis. All I had to do was take out the compost from my kitchen whenever the small counter bin filled up or it started to smell. It was usually the smell that did it, which has since put my husband off on the idea of composting.

It has been just over a year since I last composted anything, having moved to Omaha where there is not a City led composting program. But with my new challenge to make at least one sustainable change a week, I decided to start composting again. I looked into options for composting in Omaha and came up short. While some neighborhoods are taking measures into their own hands and starting a composting program, my neighborhood is not one of them. There is a location that allows you to drop off composting, but you have to pay a monthly fee. While I want to compost, I would only pay the $8.99 monthly fee if someone was picking it up from my house. One perk though is getting 1 cubic foot of compost back twice a year. I did find that the Exist Green store in my neighborhood has a compost bin in front of their store that allows anyone can drop off compost.

So being a person often out of town for travel and knowing the self drop off situation is less than idea for my household, I decided to look into creating my own compost bin in the backyard. Plus I could use the compost in my growing garden beds. It turns out its really easy to build your own and very affordable. You just need a little skill with a miter saw, drill, and staple gun and you can build a compost bin in just a few hours for about $40 (this will leave you extra chicken wire and screws for other projects too). I decided on a smaller compost bin to start, knowing I could expand if I felt the need. What I created is a 27 cubic foot compost bin (3’x3’x3’) which doubles as a blockade in the corner of my yard keeping my husky from escaping and the neighbor dog from jumping the fence. If you would like to replicate my bin you will need the following materials:

6-2”x4”x6’ boards
2-1”x4”x6’ boards
Box of 3 inch screws
Staples (and staple gun)
20 feet of chicken wire
Latch
2 hinges

You also do not need a large truck to do this. All you need is a car with seats that fold down, as a 6 foot board will fit right down the center of your seats (my Toyota Camry has handled numerous lumber heavy trips to Menards and Home Depot). For tools all you need is a miter saw (a jig saw, hand saw, or table saw would also work since this isn’t meant to look perfect), staple gun, and drill.

The hardest part of building the bin is screwing everything together. Just make sure you have a good drill bit and charged up drill. I started by cutting all my 2x4x6’s in half, then screwed together two squares. I used the remaining four boards as vertical braces to connect the top and bottom square. I connected the four 1 inch boards into a square to make a lid, but cut the corners at an angle (see the picture below) since they were the lid and I wanted them to look nicer. You could just assemble the boards like the base at 90 degree angles. Next I wrapped the frame in chicken wire along with the underside of the top lid made from the 1x4’s. I would recommend using gloves for this, as I managed to cut my hands on the wire several times. Last step was to attach the lid to the base using the hinges and screw in the latch. I am usually resourceful with my projects and found an old window latch to use to keep the lid closed. I have a resident raccoon terrorizing my yard so this step was very important for my bin.

The final product…I should have leveled it but figured a 2x4 would be fine for now

Once in place, I leveled it with some boards and filled the bottom with leaves. I added a few rotten tomatoes leftover from cleaning out the garden. I looked up what to put in a home compost bin knowing you cannot put the same waste in as a commercial composting operation. The difference in a home compost bin is the size. Materials like large branches, citrus peels, and tea bags would take far too long to break down, turning the small compost bin into more of a trash pile. Nutrient rich scraps of meat and fish sound like a great idea, until your yard becomes ransacked by vermin and small animals looking for a tasty meal (see my comment about the resident raccoon). Small Footprint Family has a nice list of 10 items that should not go into your compost bin. A great handout on backyard composting is available from the Rodale Institute.

I’m excited to get a good layer of waste into the bin before winter sets in and to see how much it will cut down on my trash output. As I write this I have several egg shells and an apple core waiting to go out to the bin and I added a rotten pumpkin to it earlier today. I also look forward to next year when I hopefully have nutrient rich compost to put into my garden, saving me $3-5 per cubic foot that I otherwise would have to purchase for my every expanding garden bed.

Update: Since building the compost bin I was visited by a very unwanted guest. I did overlook the fact that some animals, such as an opossum would be small enough to crawl underneath the boards which were slightly elevated on one side due to the uneven terrain in the back corner of my yard. I was so concerned with raccoon’s that I overlooked the easy access I had left for the other little critters. My dogs alerted me to his presence one very cold January evening and I barely slept hoping he would just crawl back out in the morning, which he did. So as a cautionary tale to anyone building their own bin, be sure the bottom of your bin is perfectly flat and maybe event dug a little into the ground to avoid any critters feasting on your scraps.