About 80 pounds of frozen balls of UCGs with some fruit bits mixed in. A local automotive service centre collects stuff from their coffee room in small compostable bags. If I don't get around to picking them up, they place them outside to freeze and I get them when I can. I chucked these 'balls' into a tumbler today and I'll go out tomorrow and stuff in a couple of bags of leaves I kept from last fall. It's still a good six weeks before it will be warm enough to do any kind of composting but a guy can day dream, right?

Lloyd

Three plastic shoe boxes full of kitchen scraps - mostly vegetable scraps, coffee grounds and some fruit peelings. Garden wastes as I trimmed my artichokes and pulled up my last broccoli plants today. I filled in with UCG from Starbucks, ashes I kept and topped off with lots of leaves! Felt really good. I actually build two underground compost piles that I started last fall. It was a good couple of hours work this afternoon.

Always liked this posting. People compost some really strange things. Around here the compost piles are blocks of ice and cannot be turned. Still, we keep adding kitchen scraps and UCGs and an occasional layer of hardwood sawdust. Come the warmth of Spring it'll get going again and the red worms will start their munching. Since cold composting takes so long our stuff won't be ready 'till the end of Summer. That's the current pile. The old one will be ready by June. The compost is truly amazing in it's effect. One thing, if your compost isn't completely finished it'll prevent seeds like lettuce and spinach from sprouting. Got that from Rodale's and also experienced it last year.

Yesterday my compost received sweet potato, beet, carrot, banana, and orange peels, apple cores, and tea bags.

Because it's still frequently below freezing here it's stored in my outdoor vinyl compost bin. In late March or early April I'll add it to the sawdust/horse manure pile I started last fall. With careful tending it will be done enough to use as mulch by June.

Woo Hoo!

Yesterday I got a truckload of tree trimmings!

I've found that the city or utility company trucks are restricted in what they can do and where they can do it, so yesterday when I saw a truck marked "XYZ Tree Service", just chock full of wood chips & still chipping, I stopped & asked about the chips.

They had to wait til the end of the day, but just after 5:00, they brought me the whole truckload!

This is not only good mulch, it's an instant compost pile;
all I have to do is stuff stuff inside!

which I did.

Yesterday evening, my new instant compost pile got

coffee/grounds/filters
egg shell
yucky milk
yucky water from flower vase & the irises that were in it
eyebrow pencil shavings

& what have you fed your compost pile today???

kale bones

About 50 rotting grapefruit, UCG, and oak leaves.

UCGs, tater peelings, various fruit and veges bits, paper towels, vacuum dust/dirt, dryer lint, toilette paper rollsand a bag of diabetic fluid that came in a bunch of stuff I got from freecycle ( dextrose????) She said it was great for plant, so I tossed it in the compost. Lots of sugar. Nancy

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this question....Can I use only grass clippings and shredded newspaper in additional to little bit kitchen scrap(Banana peelings. Veggie scraps) ...70 % grass clippings, 20 % shredded paper and 10 % kitchen waste...

Just got home from a fundraiser dinner at the Legion (I help the Ladies Auxiliary with serving and washing dishes) and scored a bunch of pails of kitchen waste. I also got enough leftovers for a few meals for DW and me but who really cares about that.

:-)

Lloyd

UGCs, kitchen scraps and tea bags, the usual suspects. We only had one frost this winter. My set up is very low tech; two holes in the ground. The "old" pile is nearly ready to use and the newer one, which is the one I add to, is about level with the ground. It usually works out that when the one is level with the ground, the curing pile is ready to use. The lasagna beds have been sitting all winter and will be ready for spring planting. The potato bed is full of earthworms for the first time, the celery from winter planting is up and crunchy (if a little bitter). All is ready for whatever seedlings I can get my hands on - I'm giving up starting seeds.

Murkat, it works more efficiently if you have 2 to 3 times the carbon (paper, autumn leaves, etc) as nitrogen (grass clippings & kitchen waste).

Too much nitrogen & it'll get slimy & smell like ammonia, but even if it does, all you have to do is add more carbon.

You can get newspaper, office paper (shredded or just discarded), & autumn leaves by posting a "wanted" on your nearest freecycle and/or craigslist.

Offices that use a lot of paper will often set it aside if you promise to come by at agreed intervals.

I go curb shopping for big trash bags of autumn leaves on the evening before the trash is picked up;
I try to do it before dark in case some homeowner gets skeered that I'm lurking around for nefarious purposes.

Today my compost critters have already gotten
the usual coffee, etc, as well as
the weekly supply of paper from the office,
a little dryer lint & vacuum cleaner dust,
icky milk,
icky tea,
slimy fruit.

They burped & said yum.

I added 3 gallons of UCG and food scraps collected from work. I added our home collection of about 4 dozen egg shells (we had company) and UCG's, and the usual suspects. Last week I added the shredded paper from my daughters mouse cage. Still mostly carbon, but the mouse adds some nitrogen to it. I bring home the paper from the shredder for her once in a while. They charge good money at the pet stores for bedding. The paper seems to work fine.

The usual ... coffee grounds, vegetable trimmings, and used kitty litter (pine stove pellets) with the feces sifted out.

And a few weeds.

On Saturday it was so warm I could finally turn my pile for the first time since winter started. I added two 5 gallon buckets I have been saving all winter long filled with vegetable/fruit waste, egg shells, egg cartons, old bread, and anything else we threw in the bucket over the winter. It really got me excited for spring to be here and finally be outside where I love to be (I hate the cold of winter). I feel my addiction to composting returning.

I actually started a new bin (4 x 4 x 4) yesterday by adding 25 five-gallon buckets of kitchen /paper towel stuff collected over the past four months along with about 25 large bags of chipped leaves from last fall's collection. The compost in the other two bins is still completely frozen so I'm not optimistic about getting much action from this one for at least a few more weeks. However, I can now add the kitchen stuff directly to the almost full bin of compostables instead of storing it in buckets! For me, that in itself is a good sign of spring.

The same thing as yesterday and the day before that, and the day before that... A wheel barrow full of horse manure, mixed with broken down pelleted straw some of which has urine mixed with it and few random wisps of uneaten hay (although with the pasture still brown the boys are pretty piggy with the hay and don't leave much!)

Now if it would just stop raining long enough to dry up a bit I could pull out the tractor with the front end loader and get the piles turned.

Fed my compost pile with 1200 lbs of free cured Elephant/ Rhino manure from the zoo last spring, plus 25 "reduced to a dollar bags of potting soil" from a local nursery when they closed for the season at the beginning of summer.
Watered and turned periodically.
It's done, now. Ready to use. Black gold.
Using it more for improving my sandy soil, less for nutrition. That I do separately.
The lazy way out.
Hmm..Actually not that lazy. It was heck hauling that stuff home. Many trips.

This post was edited by bugbite on Tue, Mar 5, 13 at 18:07

My daily bucket of UCG, crappie carcasses, food scraps, etc

My compost gets pretty much the same thing year round - veggie and fruit peels, tea bags, coffee grounds, egg shells, the occasional paper towel. Of course in the summer it also gets horse manure and fine wood shavings as the brown.

I'm trying not to be envious of the 1200 pounds of free cured elephant dung. However, I'm not scrounging as many goodies as I previously did. Actually thinking about buying compost for all I really need as there is now a good local source. Let someone else do the work while I play! :D I'll still dig in my kitchen scraps as I'd hate to throw those away.

Couple of years ago I started a compost pile with a couple of grocery bags of material to be shredded like important papers with personal info, like SS#.
Added leaves and the normal stuff. At the end of the season there was nothing left but a couple of credit cards that were cut up and accidentally put in the bags.
I know one might say there are ink issues, but the plants did not care.
This year I just started a new pile with the same except this time I soaked it in a high nitogen bath of a fertilizer that I am trying to get rid. Should help the bacteria with the "green" and speed it up.

cleaned up the sewing room yesterday, so the compost got a lot of bits of thread;
I left them on top, maybe birds can use them for nests.

also

eggshells

coffee "debris" as usual

torn-up newspaper (you don't have to have a paper shredder to use newspaper; just tear it up, & if you soak it in a bucket of water first, it breaks down more quickly).

fluted paper cups from a package of cookies

& what have you fed *your* compost today?

Chicken bedding: wood chips, alfalfa hay leftovers and lots of poo

slimy lettuce
limp celery
trimmings from carrots, onions, potatoes
torn-up junk mail & envelopes
dryer lint

slimy lettuce
limp celery
trimmings from carrots, onions, potatoes
torn-up junk mail & envelopes
dryer lint

First post long time lurker!

Today the red worms got a few molding nectarines and some banana peels.

The palette compost bins will be built this weekend and will be fed a steady diet of UGC, moldy straw and horse manure, all collected free. The straw from a farm down the way, the manure from a horse rescue, and UGC from Starbucks. Glad spring is here.

>>used kitty litter (pine stove pellets)I have to give a two-thumbs-up on this one. Stove pellets make excellent kitty litter, and there is no odor problem at all. Stove pellets are cheap, too, usually less than $10 per 40lbs, and it lasts for months!

Mine gets the same stuff every day - about 3 lbs of kitchen produce trim + ucg + eggshells, which the gets covered with about an equal volume of aged shredded wood mulch. The wood mulch comes free from our little city - they collect the tree and brush trimmings, shred it into mulch, then make it available for free to residents - 2.5 cubic yards per quarter allowance. They have piles from fresh to ~ 2 years old. I go for the six-month stuff. The daily load goes into one of two Compost Wizard tumblers - one builds for four weeks while the other turns and degrades. Then it's dump and switch.

This post was edited by TXEB on Mon, Apr 8, 13 at 20:43

Added chopped palm fronds and dead banana leaves to my pile.

Doing my yearly adding this weeks grass clipping delivery, to the gazillion leaves from last fall. I use what I can get, when it gets here. That's a full pick-up load !

Testing my newly added old camera, to my new computer. So you people are my testing post. Less painful than lugging all that grass every week. LOL

Five Banana Peels
A few slices of dried out bread
Bones and skin from two rotisserie chickens
A little left over stew
About two gallons of kitchen trimmings / shredded paper
Two bones from venison round steak
A squirrel found dead (killed by some unknown animal)

Finally warmed up. Still some snow drifts on the edges of fields but it's dry and warm enough to play in the compost. Added 6 bags of last falls leaves to the tumblers and tumbled for about two hours. All the kitchen materials added over the winter is nicely mixed in and moistened. Got two truck loads of leaves and thatch this week but it was too wet to go out into the field so I built some BIG piles. Will need some nice green grass clippings to heat it up but that's a few days away yet. Nice to finally be outside working.

Lloyd

fallen pink magnolia flowers which appear to be very high in nitrogen..they zoomed the temp way up there..

Getting ready to add grass clippings and some kitchen waste later today.

Getting ready to add grass clippings and some kitchen waste later today.

Shredded leaves, neighbor's grass clippings, coffee grounds from Star Bucks(don't drink their coffee though), whole cantaloupe, and just got a gift of 1 cf of horse poop which will go in soon, yard trimmings.

I am currently burying my kitchen trimmings in the garden between plants. Cantaloupe rind, coffee grounds and paper filter, tea bags, egg shells, green onion trimmings, paper towel fed the worms last night. There are lots of baby and adult worms everywhere I dig.

This morning I turned my compost pile for the second time this year. It was too dry so it took awhile to wet it down as I turned it. Should be ready to use by the end of June. Nice grubby garden activity on a sunny am.