Composting Tumbler
The composting tumbler is more of a teaching moment for our children and a catchall system for our compost. Most of our waste goes to the chickens or worms and whatever they don’t consume (not a whole lot) goes into the composting tumbler.
Our tiny green growers are exclusively in charge of the tumbler and they love to help load scraps in, rotate the bins, and water as needed.
What we compost in the tumbler:
Mostly things in excess!
- Excess citrus – would be too much for the worms and our chickens won’t eat it
- Excess food waste that would be considered overfeeding if we gave it to our our worms and chickens- think canning scraps, holidays, when family is in town, or any other time that there are more food scraps than usual.
- Onions and garlic- but most of the time we’ll use these scraps in a bone broth and then add to the compost.
This is the composting tumbler we have. You could easily create a composting tumbler out of a trashcan though. It was slightly annoying to put together but once assembled works great and our kids seriously love turning it. There’s even a bin for both of them!
Chickens
The chickens love just about anything from the garden, especially pest filled greens! These girls are spoiled rotten with food scraps and do a great job of turning scraps into valuable chicken poop! We then take their poop and bedding and compost that in our hot compost pile.
What our chickens compost:
- Any produce with bugs from the garden
- Hornworms or other garden pests we can easily catch so long as they haven’t had parasitic wasp eggs laid in them. It’s a slow death for the hornworm but the benefits of having those parasitic wasps in the garden are amazing! Nature is brutal, roll with it.
- Vegetable and fruit peels
- Vegetables and fruits that start to turn on our counter (but never moldy scraps- those would go to the worms!)
- Leftover banana pieces and apples that our toddlers don’t fully eat
- Small amounts of leftover rice and pasta
- Chopped eggshells
- Oyster shells
- Mice- our cats killed one and the chickens made QUICK work of breaking it down. Forgot they were omnivores for a second and now I’ll never unsee it.
- Cooked oatmeal
- Popcorn
- Pumpkins from fall decor (and our neighbor’s, too!)
- Grass clippings
- Fallen leaves- they’ll poke around for bugs and break them down in about two days. We like to collect leaves from our neighbors- only the ones who don’t spray their yards and save them for year round use!
- Shrimp shells
- Watermelon rinds
- Yogurt waste from toddlers lefotvers
Vermicomposting
Our worms get anything that our chickens don’t or can’t eat. For example, our chickens will eat a banana but absolutely refuse to eat the peels… so the worms get the peels! The worms have been a great addition to our composting systems.
Why we like vermicomposting over traditional composting:
- The worms are able to break down food scraps into usable worm castings in a relatively short amount of time
- There’s almost no odor (same goes for our other systems so long as they’ve got the proper amounts of greens and carbon)
- We don’t have to cure their compost like we do with our hot compost pile
The compost system we use is buried in a raised garden bed and feeds the soil in the bed as the worms break down the compost. The in ground bin keeps them more insulated in the winter and has kept larger animals out of the bin as well.
We’ve used a stacking vermicomposting bin in the past and it got knocked over by our toddlers and invaded by slugs. It was a mess to keep up with so we stayed away from vermicomposting until we recently got a subpod!
If you’re interested in vermicomposting in a subpod, they generously gave me a coupon code for my wonderful gardening community! Code: TINYGREENGROWERS10 gets you 10% off. Feel free to message me with any questions, I’m happy to answer!
What our worms compost:
- Coffee grounds, coffee filters (unbleached), and tea/tea bags (no staples or plastic)
- Ground eggshells
- Anything our chickens can’t have like onions, potato peels, and eggplant, tomato, and pepper leaves
- Grass clippings
- Our fallen leaves & neighbor’s leaves (assuming they don’t spray their trees)
- Citrus (in moderation)
- Small quantities of meat, cheese, fish, dairy (but the worms need to be established before feeding them these)
- Shredded newspaper and office documents
- Toilet rolls
- Shredded cardboard (no tape)
- Garlic (in moderation)
- Our vacuum canister contents (as long as all the material is organic) or things we sweep from the floor
- Hair- dog & human
- Dryer lint
- Cotton balls
The hardest part of our vermicomposting journey was waiting the two weeks for the population of worms to settle in and get acclimated to their new home. Ever since they’ve been loving churning through our waste and the boys love looking at the worms and adding red wrigglers after every rain storm.
Hot Compost Pile
We have two hot compost piles and these are exclusively for our chicken poop and chicken bedding. We have to monitor the temperature of the compost pile to make sure their poop is fully “cooked” so we don’t introduce pathogens into the garden.
Why Hot Composting?
Fresh chicken poop can contain pathogens that are harmful to people and animals. To reduce the pathogens that are present, you need to fully compost the poop. Chicken poop can contain E. Coli, Salmonella, Cryptosporidium, and other pathogens.
Some gardeners will add fresh poop and litter directly to their beds and let it sit and work into the soil. That may work for some, but for us, it’s not an option. Our tiny humans dig around in the dirt with us and it’s rare for any bed to be empty long enough for the chicken poop to compost as a top dressing.
Also- children under five can have worse reactions should they be exposed to salmonella and E. Coli. Good hand-washing after being around the chickens is something we practice with our boys, but we’d rather not have to wash hands every 10 seconds while we’re in garden beds playing and planting!
We started off adding chicken poop and bedding to the composting tumblers but we quickly ran out of space and the kids wanted to turn the bins which totally defeated the purpose of the bins keeping the poop away from our children.
Thermogenic composting takes place out of reach of our kids in a blocked off area of the yard. We formed two large cages out of wire mesh and the cages are in a shady spot in the garden. Even in the shade, the hot compost piles will get up to 160 F which should kill most animal pathogens.
How We’re Using It
The two separate cages allow us to do a deep spring clean of the coop and place it into one cage while the other cage is finishing maturing.
We started adding to the first cage with the large chicken coop clean out in the spring. This pile won’t have anything added to it and will “cook” until late fall and once the compost has “cooked,” we’ll start curing the compost. This pile should go into the garden in late fall or in early spring so long as it has had the time to cook and cure.
While the first cage sits and cooks, we’ll add current bedding and poop to the second cage. We’ll keep adding to this cage until we do our the next spring cleaning of the coop and then the second cage will cook and cure.
The schedule should look like:
April: deep clean coop & add to cage that hasn’t “cooked or cured.” We’ll cook this with time and turning of the pile until it fully cooks and cures .
April- following March: we’ll add weekly and daily poop clean outs to the cage that is relatively empty compared to the other cage with the spring coop cleaning. The cage that we’re adding weekly poop to is not cooking or curing while we’re actively adding to it. In the spring, this cage will become the new dumping zone for the deep clean of the coop. Then it’ll sit and cure until we’re ready to use it.
Late fall or early spring: empty out larger cage that has cooked and cured and add to the garden. This cage becomes the new cage to add daily and weekly coop cleaning debris to. We’ll add to this cage until the following spring when it becomes the new dumping site for the deep clean in the spring and then it will sit again.
Final Notes
We could add everything to our hot compost pile if we wanted to but the worm bin breaks things down quicker and gives us castings for the garden, the chickens love scraps as snacks, and the kids really enjoy turning their own tumbler bins.
This is what works for us and it’s taken some trial and error to get to where we need to be to minimize our waste and optimize our composting systems.
Happy Composting!
-Bridget
