D E S I G N /// ck

how to build a compost bin


Alice and I are way more excited about composting than we should be. Last night I built our first compost bin. I used some old pallets that had been used to deliver building materials for the house. I almost threw them away, but I know I could use them for something, if even just for firewood. We got a great book about compost gardening a few weeks ago, and inside was a way to build a bin out of pallets. Voila! It's easy- set them up vertically into a three-sided box and screw or nail together the corners. I even like the way it has a sort of modern a la Mockbee architectural look to it.

Composting is a great way to organically fertilize your garden and reduce the amount of waste you send to the landfill. Between recycling and composting, we've cut our weekly garbage in half. Pretty soon we'll have monthly batches of compost to recharge the soil in our garden.

Coming soon: Planting!

horse poop

The good weather this weekend really helped us get some work done on the garden. I'm going to start reporting here the progress of our first garden. Hopefully I can help pass along the tricks we learn and the warn against mistakes made.


Laurence and I went up to a horse farm for manure. Luckily, we got some of the old stuff that had already composted some. That will help speed up the process in the garden, and it smelled a little less (a MAJOR benefit).


Horse poop on site. There's nothing like standing ankle high in a pickup truck load of poop, shoveling it out. Nothing like it.


We got the base of our beds leveled out and tilled. Rather than try to grow stuff in the so-so dirt of our yard, we're building up terraces to hold 6" thick plant beds on top of the existing soil. The picture above shows it with most of the bed material in, a pungent mix of organic topsoil, horse poop, and bit of soil conditioner.


In the meantime, we've started getting some seedlings to grow in our peat moss tray. These are pea plants, which Mr. Davis says should always be planted by Valentine's Day. We'll transplant them in a few weeks and put some new seeds. The tray is a great way to start from seeds, as you can control what the growth conditions better. If it gets too cold, move 'em inside. You can get a tray like this and peat moss discs at any Home Depot.

Next up, I'm building a three zone composting bin out of old delivery pallets. Stay tuned!

Alice and I are putting in a garden this year, now that we actually have a yard to grow something in. Yesterday we got the first step finished- leveling out terraces along the sunny side of the yard. Now we have 192 square feet of growing space! It doesn't look like much, but we should be able to get a good amount of food out of it. Currently we're "incubating" our seeds in trays inside. Coming soon: a pickup truck load of horse poop (thanks free Craigslist!) and topsoil.