cornucopia

I wanted a compost tumbler, but I didn’t want to spend any money. After a lot of deliberations (and conversations with Logan), this is what I did.

Logan gave me two cattle feed bins from his family’s cattle farm in Coweta. Here they are with yard clippings in them.

I used a jigsaw to cut holes in the bottom centers of the bins, the just a little larger in diameter than the scrap piece of PVC I got for free from the local ACE Hardware.

Mojo helped. Surely none of this would have been achieved without his aid.

Next I cut a window in one of the feed bins.

In usual ding-dong fashion, I got ahead of myself: I should have attached hinge and lock hardware to the bin window before cutting, but it wasn’t anything a little tape couldn’t help.

Next I drilled holes in the PVC pipe to ensure proper aeration for the ‘post. Here are the stacked cinder blocks (complements of LRR) to hold the tumbler. My last challenge was how to attach the feed bins together to make the barrel. Believe it or not, I had already gotten this far without deciding for sure how I was going to do that.

In the end, I chose to go with duct tape. What cannot be done with this prodigious invention?

This is, admittedly, a very small bin. I tumble as often as I take scraps out there, but the process is still rather slow. I also end up mixing the compost by hand quite a bit, just to make sure it’s getting proper aeration. I’ve been composting for about three months now and I’m pretty happy with this set-up. I spent only $8 on the hinges and lock from ACE.