I think it was last week that I mentioned that my eldest son had agreed to help me sort out the compost bin chaos out with some new bins. True to his word when I got home at lunchtime on Saturday from the Hardy Plant Society meeting he had started work on transforming the disaster zone that is my composting area.
Luckily we have access to a supply of pallets so he had managed to bring home 6 in his Defender which is a good start. The biggest issue we have is the slope of the garden which is most pronounced at the top of the garden where the bins live (you can see the angle from the angle of the fence). So he had spent some time levelling off (sort of) the area where the new bin was to go.
The advantage of the new bin, apart from its vastness, is that you empty it from the front. The current purpose-built purchased ones are in fact hopelessly useless. The bins are constructed from planks of wood that you build up layer on layer so if you want to empty them properly you have to dismantle the whole thing. In addition due to the slope of the ground etc I actually stand almost level with the top of the bins so I have to dig down into them or alternatively stand in them to empty them which means they don’t get empty and then the actual bins rot which is where we are now.
The first bin has been built and the content of one of the remaining bins has been moved into it (the pile to the left of the new bin in the photo above) and there is still heaps of space.
The front has been added and is secured with rope. I will be able to store canes in the side of the bin which is a bonus. There is now a second smaller bin in which the wheelbarrow is currently living as the bin isn’t complete. – they are a bit like Little and Large. We ran out of large pallets and space so the second bin will be a long thin bin once we have acquired some more pallets, again front opening. Then, with yet more pallets we are going to build some sort of log store to go under the willow to the right of the new bin. This I suspect will be more designed as I think my son is talking about breaking pallets up to create something with good airflow so the logs dry out properly (he uses them for wood-turning) but anything will be a definite improvement on the rickety construction that I generally try to avoid showing in photos.
So the compost bin area is getting serious and hopefully by Christmas it will all be neat and tidy and ready for next year. I may even paint the bins to match the shed, for some reason this made my youngest laugh!
