adventures in composting
Jan. 17th, 2020 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettPrompted by conversation elsewhere, I just want to note that I am still Very Happy with my Hotbin. My current Delight is that it will fairly happily digest polylactic acid, a bioplastic used as filament in many 3D printers: Adam's workplace has one such printer for general use, and these days there's a scrap bin kept next to it for misprints and odds & ends, which he then lovingly carries home to me, for me to take to the allotment as Bin Tribute. Really dense prints tend to need to go through twice, but they go from "impossible for me to crush" on the first pass to "trivial to fragment" for the second, so that's nice. Among other things, it's reducing my other plastic consumption in one significant way: I parcel my meds out into dosette boxes, and the thing I always break first is the lids, but! I no longer have to buy An Entire New Set when attempts to glue them back together fail, because Adam will now print them for me.
... which is a massive digression from the thing I actually intended to talk about, which is How I Keep My Bin Happy. So. Having enthusiastically vacuumed up pretty much all the info on their website, most-but-not-all of what I actually need to do to keep the bin happy is in there.
In summary: each week (approximately), I feed it about a kitchen caddy's worth of food scraps, another large volume of weeds, a significant quantity of shredded paper (with especial thanks toalexwlchan, cesy and sebastienne for providing tribute to supplement my own shreddings), and Another Quantity of something bulky, per recommendations. "Bulky" is either pre-prepared partially-composted woodchip (delivered to the allotment site and available for free, which is convenient), or -- depending on the state I'm in in terms of garden waste -- prunings from bushes and long spongy stalks (artichoke, fennel) cut into small bits.
I do compost kitchen caddy liners and magazine wrappers and such that are made out of potato starch, but those need shredding into small pieces. I am happy to do this by hand (having let them dry out a little in the greenhouse first) because it's a Job That Feels Useful that I can do sitting down, but it would almost certainly be faster to either have a pair of dedicated scissors or use paper caddy liners. On the other hand, magazine wrappers (... and Waitrose vegetable bags...) are right there, so if I have them anyway I had might as well use them, is my general attitude.
Fed twice a week, and emptied out every ninety days, this is pretty much enough to keep it happy. With my current set-up.
I've got a first-generation Hotbin. I found, when getting started, that it is really important to have the bin positioned such that -- if it's on a slope -- the grille at the bottom on the front of the bin is pointing downhill, to allow the leachate to drain freely. If the bin is facing the other way, such that the grille's at the top of the internal slope, you can get enough build-up of liquid to seriously limit the ability of the bin to get up to temperature (some combination, I think, of air flow and air humidity and heat capacities). The other thing I'm having to pay more active attention to, at the moment, is air flow more generally: I empty out the layer of mature compost from the bottom of the bin approximately every ninety days, and we're currently two weeks out from the next batch, so the bin itself is Rather Full. The temperature was struggling to get much above 40, and improved all of a sudden when I opened the air vent a little more.
... that is all the infodump I have in me right now, but I am very happy to be given further prompts? The executive summary is "pretty much always more shredded paper", though.
... which is a massive digression from the thing I actually intended to talk about, which is How I Keep My Bin Happy. So. Having enthusiastically vacuumed up pretty much all the info on their website, most-but-not-all of what I actually need to do to keep the bin happy is in there.
In summary: each week (approximately), I feed it about a kitchen caddy's worth of food scraps, another large volume of weeds, a significant quantity of shredded paper (with especial thanks to
alexwlchan, cesy and sebastienne for providing tribute to supplement my own shreddings), and Another Quantity of something bulky, per recommendations. "Bulky" is either pre-prepared partially-composted woodchip (delivered to the allotment site and available for free, which is convenient), or -- depending on the state I'm in in terms of garden waste -- prunings from bushes and long spongy stalks (artichoke, fennel) cut into small bits.I do compost kitchen caddy liners and magazine wrappers and such that are made out of potato starch, but those need shredding into small pieces. I am happy to do this by hand (having let them dry out a little in the greenhouse first) because it's a Job That Feels Useful that I can do sitting down, but it would almost certainly be faster to either have a pair of dedicated scissors or use paper caddy liners. On the other hand, magazine wrappers (... and Waitrose vegetable bags...) are right there, so if I have them anyway I had might as well use them, is my general attitude.
Fed twice a week, and emptied out every ninety days, this is pretty much enough to keep it happy. With my current set-up.
I've got a first-generation Hotbin. I found, when getting started, that it is really important to have the bin positioned such that -- if it's on a slope -- the grille at the bottom on the front of the bin is pointing downhill, to allow the leachate to drain freely. If the bin is facing the other way, such that the grille's at the top of the internal slope, you can get enough build-up of liquid to seriously limit the ability of the bin to get up to temperature (some combination, I think, of air flow and air humidity and heat capacities). The other thing I'm having to pay more active attention to, at the moment, is air flow more generally: I empty out the layer of mature compost from the bottom of the bin approximately every ninety days, and we're currently two weeks out from the next batch, so the bin itself is Rather Full. The temperature was struggling to get much above 40, and improved all of a sudden when I opened the air vent a little more.
... that is all the infodump I have in me right now, but I am very happy to be given further prompts? The executive summary is "pretty much always more shredded paper", though.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-18 02:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-18 12:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-18 04:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-18 06:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-19 06:55 pm (UTC)(We seem to end up with a lot of shredded paper, so it would be really nice to have a faff-free way of getting rid of it!)