The Beginning of a Composting Adventure

Last year, I read the book The Omnivore's Dilemma and was fascinated by the section about sustainable farming. As I was reading it, my imagination took off thinking about how much energy was in the weeds that I had pulled from our yard and in the branches I had pruned from our trees and bushes. That got me looking into ways to reinvest that energy into the soil, rather than sending it off to a landfill where–thanks to the research of a friend who is similarly tortured by the need to do good–I knew that lots of plant life fails to decay due to the anaerobic nature of a big pile of garbage. If I remember correctly, researchers have recovered an avocado intact even after several decades in the dump.

Anyway, all of that led me to looking for local companies that ran composting services. I found one that I liked and signed up. They brought me a 7-gallon bucket every week and picked up whatever compostable waste I had put into the previous week's bucket. This worked OK for a while, but we ran into two problems with the service:

1. The amount of compostable waste we generate is irregular. Given that there are only two humans in our house, we'd sometimes have weeks where we had very little compostable waste that we generated, maybe 1.5-2 gallons worth. But there were other weeks when we'd do a bunch of yard work and have more waste than our bucket could hold, meaning we either had to find somewhere to store (slowly decomposing) yard waste and wait, or just give up and throw much of it away in the garbage.
2. This is weird, but it is true and was frustrating: One of our neighbors seemed to think the bucket we'd set out for the compost company to pick up was just free to take, so, on several occasions, he'd walk over across the street to our house and take the buckets from us. The first time it happened, all that I could think about was what he must have thought when he opened and found our moldy slices of bread, a week's worth of coffee filters and grounds, and half a dozen banana peels. Well, whatever he thought, it did not stop him from doing this again two more times. Each time I'd have to call the compost company to get them to drop off a new bucket for us at the next weekly visit. Which really isn't a big deal, but also bothered me an inordinate amount.

So given all of these problems, I decided to see what I could do spending less than the cost of three months of the compost service. As it turns out, if you've got a lot of space, you can just kind of set up a compost pile on a tarp somewhere and mostly be set. For a few reasons (including an HOA and a dog with a knack for getting into gross things), I decided to go with a compost tumbler:

It has two compartments for composting. Today I loaded the first compartment with scraps that I've been collecting for the last 3 or 4 months in 5 gallon buckets. I had two 5 gallon buckets full of kitchen scraps and another 5 gallon bucket filled with shredded paper that I'm hoping will work as well. Here's what it looks like today: