Why make a home compost? When we like gardening, both professional and amateur, we know how important it is to provide the necessary nutrients to the soil where we plant our plants.
That’s why it’s important to have a home composter.
There are many options to have one bought in a store, even large and renowned brands, but nothing more rewarding than making a home compost.
To help you with that idea, we bring you a guide with several options to make a home compost, which allows you to manage your organic waste and provide the necessary nutrients to your plants without using any chemicals.
Table of Contents
Composting with large drums
Compost, when done correctly, should not have any unpleasant smell. However, we must recognize that a home compost is not a decoration item that we want to have in sight of everyone either.
The first option will allow you to make a home compost, in a simple, fast, but above all, taking care of the image of your home.
To make this type of home composting you will need the drums you want to use, tubes, wood, nails, screws and hinges.
Lay the drum on the ground and with the help of an electric saw, open a small door in the center of it. Through this door you will introduce the waste that you will turn into organic compost.
You will secure the lid to the drum with the hinges and screws. It is advisable to fit it with a strong lock or pin to ensure that the contents do not spill during the handling of the compost.
Then, in the upper and lower bases, open two holes where you will insert the tube. Remember that the homemade compost will have weight, so you must select a tube of material and thickness that ensures resistance to weight.
Insert the tube through the drum. You could put some clamps on the outside of the drum, which will serve as a stop and limit movement.
Now, with the wood, build a structure to place the drum. If you are going to use only one drum, you will have to fix four pieces of wood in the shape of two X’s and place the tube of the drum at the point where the X’s meet.
If you are going to use two or more drums, it is ideal to build a frame to support the installation of at least two drums per section.
Make sure that the drums move on the axis freely, this will be important to move the materials of your compost during its manufacture.
Wine-scented Compost
Wine barrels are a decorative element used in homes, restaurants, hotels, resorts and anywhere you want to imagine. They tend to capture people’s gaze and reinforce the personality of your spaces.
If you don’t have much space in your home and want to make a home compost, using a barrel is an excellent option.
You have two ways to do it, following the same step by step above, just replacing the drums with the wine barrels.
Another option is to use them vertically by removing the top of the barrel to turn it into a removable lid and placing the tube in the middle, so that you can turn the barrel and, in turn, move the contents.
Making a homemade compost bin with pallets
Pallets are noble items that have many uses and can be made into great and functional ideas for you and your family.
Building a home composter with pallets is very simple and the amount of material you will need will depend on the size you want for your composter.
We will make a small one, although remember that the size of the pallets is big.
For this way of making a home compost bin you need six pallets to recycle, wire mesh, hinges, screws and many wood nails.
The first thing we’ll do is disassemble the part that serves as legs for five of the pallets, keeping the boards that are forming a grid.
The pallet we don’t intervene with will be the floor of the home composting plant. Around it, he places four pallets, as a wall.
Now, cover all the interior of the compost with the metallic mesh, the same must catch the compost, avoiding that the content of the homemade composter goes out.
With the help of the hinges, row the last pallet in the upper area of the compost bin.
This way of making a home compost bin has a problem and that is that it is difficult to reach the bottom part of the bin.
For this reason, many people make a door in front of the compost or devise a way to be able to remove and place the contents without much difficulty.
Recycle those old tires
Old tyres or rubbers from your car can also be recycled into various products, bringing something beyond the original use for which they were manufactured into your life.
To make a homemade compost with tyres, you will have to cut off the whole central area of the tyres, leaving only the area that has contact with the pavement. The tire is very hard, you must help with an electric saw to make this cut.
Stack the rubbers, you can use wooden strips to nail them down and make sure they always stay in place.
Now it’s time to make the lid of the compost, you can make it with pieces of wood to recycle, ready! That’s how easy it is to make a compost at home with old tyres.
Composting with plastic baskets
Plastic baskets, despite being made of plastic, are a noble material for recycling that can be used in many crafts. Today we will see them turned into a home composting machine.
For this craft we will use three plastic baskets. Two of them we will remove the base, leaving only the four walls.
We pile up the three baskets, leaving the plastic basket that we did not modify as the base of the home composter.
Join them with the help of wire and cover the entire interior with semi-rigid plastic or metal mesh. The idea is that the contents do not fall out of the basket.
Now make a lid with one of the bases you removed from the baskets. Cover the lid with plastic or mesh, preventing any unwanted animals from entering your home composting bin.
How does a compost bin work?
The compost bin is a space where you place organic waste to be naturally degraded and transformed into organic fertilizer or compost, which will then serve to feed the soil of your plants.
In general, the compost bin should be placed in an area that is not always exposed to the sun and with plenty of ventilation.
Oxygen is important in this process. It is recommended that every so often, you remove the contents of the compost with a shovel, this way you ensure that everything is receiving the necessary amount of oxygen and reduce the smell.
It is also recommended to add living soil, as it is called to the soil used to plant the plants, so that the organic waste is moist and the ideal environment is created for its proper degradation.
Another recommended technique, especially when we are in areas of dry climate is to bind the compost with layers of newspaper moistened in water, thus ensuring that the necessary moisture is maintained for the process to develop.
Making a home compost will allow you to get rid of your organic waste naturally, recycle some materials and keep your plants without using any chemical additives, harmful to your health and the planet.
What can be placed inside a home compost bin?
It’s important that you understand the purpose of your compost bin, it’s not an organic waste bin, if you’re thinking about it you better look for other options.
The idea is to create a food for the plants, which you can use in your gardens to enrich the soil with nutrients from the degradation of certain materials.
In a home compost bin, it is customary to place kitchen waste such as fruit peels, eggshells, strained fruit remains, coffee, and old vegetables, among others.
In addition to adding natural products such as dry grass, pineapples, tree or wood debris, branches and dry leaves.
To complete the compost, they add leaves and green branches. You can also put in horse or cow dung, animals whose diet is based on plants.
All this is stirred with the help of a shovel until you get a mixture of all the ingredients of your compost.
We must allow the compost to mature and the natural degradation process to be completed, in the end we will obtain a brown, moist mixture that we can bind with soil and add to the plants in our garden.
Mistakes to avoid
Building a home compost bin and making your own compost is a simple process, however, it is not without its pitfalls.
As we have said, the first thing you should be clear about is that the home composting system will help you reduce your organic waste, but that does not mean it is a dump.
Therefore, the only error that can affect the expected results is in the placement of material not suitable for the manufacture of home compost.
These materials are highly polluting or do not degrade as you might think, counteracting the benefit of making your own compost.
Avoid placing the following elements inside your home compost:
- Derived from milk, such as cheese or yogurt.
- Remains of red or white meat or fish.
- Fatty products or products with active yeasts.
- Dog, cat or human feces.
- Synthetic fabrics. This is plastic and will not degrade.
- Cigarette filters, it is a very strong pollutant.
- Magazines with colored inks or plasticized papers.
Do you have any additional questions or ideas for making a homemade behaviorist? Write it down in the comments.
