So you’re a garden composter. You’ve learned how to make compost. You’ve made, bought, borrowed or stolen a compost bin. You’re adding garden waste and recycling kitchen scraps. Now the awkward bit – the wait… How long will it take to make the compost?
If you have a reasonably large compost bin (say 1 metre cubed), the chances are you could go on filling it indefinitely. As you add to the top, the garden and kitchen waste underneath will slowly be decomposing, composting and creating humus. As it does this the organic matter shrinks. That leaves you more room on the top, to add more garden and kitchen waste. The dilemma is, if you never run out of space for the garden waste, chances are you will just go on and on, adding more and never seeing the benefit of kompostownik z palet the rich garden compost you have made!
For those of you with smaller compost bins such as the beehive compost bin, or a kitchen composter, no such worries. You will run out of space relatively quickly and so automatically stop adding more garden waste and naturally wait patiently for your new garden compost to be created. In your case you will have discovered pretty quickly that you need at least two compost bins!
Time Limit for Creating the Compost Heap
Unless you have a compost bin you easily fill quickly, you’ll need to set yourself a time limit for creating the compost heap. And, you will need to stick to it! The very best way to do this, is to keep a record of when you started your compost pile. Then, according to available space and time you expect to take to fill it, assign yourself a date when you will stop putting garden waste on that heap.
We have various compost heaps of different sizes from 1/2m cubed to 1m cubed. For the smaller compost piles I give myself 3 months in which to create the pile. For the larger, we give them 6 months of ‘creation’. Once that date is reached we cap off the compost heap and start creating another.