Hi, I’m Ed Burske with DC Urban Gardeners and we’re here now at the Children’s Studio School Garden.
It’s just a few blocks from my home garden and we built this large container garden last year and we were given this composter if you remember, I talked earlier about manufactured type of composters. So this isn’t a bin that you build to yourself although I did require a little bit of assembly when it arrived. This is manufactured to work just as you see it, a big barrel set horizontally; it actually has two chambers, one here and one here that you access by flipping open these, hooks here and then it sets on a stand that has these rollers. Then instead of turning the bin, tuning the compost with a pitchfork or a spade, you use this handle here, to turn the bin and you can here all the contents of the bin, shaking around in there.
That does the same sort of aerating action with the bacteria that we do when we actually manually fork the compost. It’s the contents in there which are the same sort of contents. Grass clippings, leaves that we collected in the fall, shredded newspaper and actually some left-over or scraps from the lunch room here at the school, and then placed in the compost, watered and turned once or twice every day to keep that air circulating with the bacteria and keep the bacteria moving. This is a pretty big composter model, it don’t get much bigger than this for home use that would be pretty hard to turn, but actually there are lot different composting models and much smaller that you could use even on an apartment balcony or on your back patio, or in your backyard. The one thing they have in common is they all have some sort of tumbling action, either horizontally like this or sometimes they flip end over end, and all you do is feed the compost into the tumbler and make sure it gets a little water, tumble it to air it and then remove the compost when it’s finished. Next, we’re going to be talking about how you compost with worms.