Compost Team

When we moved here to the farm, Tom built a composting system that consisted of three bins made of wood frames covered with chicken wire.  You can see a picture of them if you look at my blog from March 14, 2010.  That system worked for a while, but it became apparent pretty quickly that if we were going to have to do something different to make enough compost for all our needs.  For one thing, it was way too much work to try to turn it by hand.

So, we began looking for a way we could use our tractor to help with the work.  The solution we hit upon uses one of the chicken-wire compost bins and a large "heap" compost pile out in the field.  The chicken-wire bin is used as a "catch all" bin where we dump kitchen waste, garden produce that is too low quality to eat, dead plants of various sorts, used potting soil and so forth.  It is hinged on the sides and opens up to allow us to use the tractor to scoop up its contents and haul them to the heap in the field.  We then use the tractor's front-end-loader to turn the pile in the field.  Here are pictures of our chicken-wire pile.

During the Thanksgiving holidays, Tom and I teamed up to empty the this compost pile (it was full at that time) and mix it in with the compost pile in the field along with some leaves that Tom gathered with our lawn sweeper.  Here is Tom with the lawn sweeper.  The nice thing about this sweeper is that you can dump it without getting off the lawnmower.

My job in all this was to drive the tractor and, using the front-end-loader, move the material from the chicken-wire compost pile to the area above.  Since I couldn't take a picture of myself on the tractor, I did the next best thing.  I took a picture of my shadow!

When we were finished mixing the leaves in with all the other compost material, we had the big pile shown below.  It is difficult to judge how big it is, but it is easily 5-6 feet tall.

We will get the tractor out a couple of times before spring and turn it to help it decompose more readily.  Hopefully, by the time we get ready to plant this spring, we'll have lots of good compost to mix in the soil.