My compost bin is full - What now?

Hello all, I hope you are all well on this glorious spring like day.

My outside compost bin is finally full. During warmer weather when the bugs, fungi and microbes are at their most active, it is virtually impossible to fill as it just eats everything as fast as I can add more. But now, as we start to come out of winter, with the bugs and microbes having slowed right down, now my bin is full.

This must be normal. In the past, I've dug part rotted stuff into the ground because the ground has needed whatever it can get. Now I want to do it right.

So, how do you get round the fact that once the bin is full, there is a period of some weeks or months when the top stuff is still not ready?

 

Thats why I have 2 dumpy bags on the go, time i've filled the second the first is usually ready.

You could turn it over, giving it a bit of a mix so that when the weather warms up the microbes will attack the fresher stuff.

Theres usually a bit of unrotted stuff that goes back into the new heap, and, like Scrungee, the occasional Coconut.

 

Have three on a rotation.

Once one is full and needs to be left for a while, you then start on #2; when #2 is full, you can begin filling #3. By the time #3 is full, #1 should be rich and ready for spreading (thus, emptying it, ready to start filling it again) and so on, and so on.

Mr Mum and 'Oddjob-of-the-Week' have difficulty managing this concept though when they empty the indoor kitchen bins

 

I like to compost what I can, but I've never managed to do it with any kind of plan, it just dont seem to work.
As you say, it rots down well in summer but once the autumn comes the amount of compostable material increases as the temperatures drop.
So it just sits there all the winter looking like a slime heap.

 

Does your compost bin lid have a hinge down the middle or does all the lid lift at the same time? The reason I ask is I can push newly tipped 'stuff' to the back section beyond the hingeline where the worms seem to work harder when they are in permanent darkness. There they have produced a gap for me to push more before them to 'digest'.

Cheers, Tony.

 

You need more compost bins.

I've got 7 black plastic 'Daleks', 3 pallet sized bays and numerous corrugated iron bays (mainly used for horse poo/chicken straw). The plastic composters are continually being filled to the top (with stuff that might prove attractive to rats, wasps, etc.) and I move onto another, then another, etc. and by the time I've filled the last one the first is half empty and I start all over again. The trouble is they freeze solid in cold winters and nothing rots until spring.

 

My compost bin is actually my ordinary 'green waste' wheelie bin, except with lots of breathing holes drilled into it, and larger drainage holes in the bottom that double up as route for worms to find their way in. Its quite effective, in that anything compostable that I put in it vanishes very quickly during the summer, and it does even go down slowly in the winter. I have a couple of buckets that I use in rotation in the kitchen (one getting filled up while the other is outside waiting for me to clean it). These buckets, probably 2 or 3 gallons each, get filled typically twice a week, and emptied into the outside bin. The product of me weeding the garden and pruning stuff also goes into the outside compo bin, so you can imagine it should fill quite quickly. Its almost a year since I last emptied my outside compo bin, and when I checked today, after starting this thread, it had made enough room for another bucket or two so even now, it is still going.

I don't really have room for too much composting at home, but I think with a bit of rearranging, I could fit another bin without losing any space. Sounds like that's the solution.

 

I don't make as much compost as some people on here but I've found it you give it a really good turn it usually frees up a bit of space.

If not you could always get yourself a wormery and put your kitchen waste in there, which rots down quicker, even in the winter. I've found this saves a small amount of space and breaks down things that would take a lot longer to break down anyway.

 

Agree with the "you need more compost bins advice"

Are you planning to grow Runner Beans? They would be very happy being grown in a trench which was filled with completely uncomposted material during the winter, and partially composted material would be even better I expect. Might be an "emergency" route to shifting some material?

 

I abandoned that practice as it attracted rats before planting and I wondered whether it may also have attracted the mice after planting that worked their way along each row eating the below ground cotyledons and thus destroying every single plant, and now use only completely composted material.

 

I got the rats in mine last time too, tunelled the lot out.

 

get inside it and trample it down!

 

Its not a good idea to squash the air out of it. Anaerobic digestion is a particularly stinky way for stuff to decompose

 

Good point. I've never actually tried it, every year I remind my self too late that I have, yet again, forgotten, and I just muck the trench instead. I'll stick to that formula then

I think mice will eat Bean seeds (and Peas, which no doubt they prefer and can smell from miles around!! :( ) regardless. That's one of the reasons why I start mine off in pots (Broad and Runner Beans; Peas I do in guttering suspended from the roof so that Mice can't get to them, no matter how acrobatic they are! and then slide the plants en-block into a pre-prepared trench)

 

You need a friendly or grumpy cat to patrol your compost heaps. I have one belonging to a neighbour very grumpy indeed but no mice so he sleeps in a purpose made box in my shed. One good turn..............
Since our purge on recycling in Mid Wales, and it works well, very little land fill going out, we have quite a bit of compostable stuff. The ideas above are very welcome. We need a small compost winter bin that could live near the house saving constant trips up the garden during the wet and miserable weather. This would have holes in the bottom to help earth worms. Keeping it warm would be difficult unless it stayed in the greenhouse (soil beds) which is only a few yards away. All sorts of possibilities.