You Grow Girl™

Joined: 29 Jul 2004 Posts: 5 Location: Massachusetts

Does anyone use a commercial compost tumbler? I'm looking at one with an eye to ease of use. No more turning by hand, etc. It's expensive, so wondering if it's worth it. Thanks

Posted: 26-10-04 23:05

I have a couple of bin composters, which I like, but I do have to turn the compost by hand. I think the tumblers look pretty cool, especially the ones that you can roll around the yard. I wonder if it is as convenient as it looks to roll the composter to where you need the compost, if it is, that's great. Compost is heavy though, so it might not be so easy to go rolling a full batch of compost around the garden.
In summary:
I don't have an answer for you Wink

I just have 2 cents to throw in.

Posted: 27-10-04 12:29

putting my two cents in.....

i think that those 200 litres indrustrial plastic drums would be great to roll around the garden. they cost around 150 bucks here. so u could get them at under 5 dollars US. of course you have to wash them thouroughly.

Joined: 29 Jul 2004 Posts: 5 Location: Massachusetts

The one I'm eyeing is the smaller Compostumbler. Has a crank handle.

Posted: 03-08-08 0:22

i know this is an old thread, but i was wondering about the same thing.

i have been looking online, especially Amazon because they have a few their with ratings and i also searched Consumer Reports as well for their findings and rating on these tumblers. one is small, and it is hand cranked, looks about the size/shape as the thing-y that holds the water hose, and another style is the one that reminds me of a cement tumbler.

in the mean time, i have the gardener tossing all the lawn clippings and leaves on this long patch of dirt next to the garage. and sometimes he puts the lawn clippings on the areas where there are veggies and herbs growing.

but what do you think about the tumblers and your experience or what you have heard your friends say. please and thank you.

-CG11

Posted: 10-08-08 21:57

My MIL's neighbor was a master gardener, and one day while visiting my MIL, I noticed Paige had a dismantled compost tumbler behind the shed. I asked her about it, and she said it was too small for what she needed. The tumbling did break stuff down really fast, but not as fast as she needed it to, for the amount of weeds and stuff she had. I think she was trying it with mostly weeds and leaves and deadheaded flowers. She had a small urban lot- less than quarter acre. I don't think she was using a lot of kitchen stuff- it was mostly garden waste.(all of this is in past tense, because she died a few years ago.) I hope this info helps- I haven't used a tumbler myself, but talking to her, made me realize it wouldn't work for my needs. The kind she had was like a 50 gallon barrel mounted on a frame, with an axel that went through the center of the barrel.

Posted: 12-08-08 4:48

thank you so much for replying with your MIL's neighbor.....

i think i might just get it, we produce alot of kitchen green waste and what little the gardener mows up should be good, i think, here is the link to the Amazon site for the Envirocycle Tumbling Composter. Just in case anybody else was wondering what i was talking about.

-Amy

Posted: 21-12-08 10:43

I had asked my husband to build me a rolling composter last year, but he's out of town often, so it wasn't really an option. So I picked out the Sun-Mar garden composter - I think I got the 400. I have to say, having used both the pile system and the black 'box' style composter, I'm super happy with this! I kind of have a weak stomach, so turning compost for me was a bit of a chore, but with the rolling composter, I just load the kitchen bits in the top, close the door, and then give it a good roll, and everything gets mixed up together!

I haven't had the opportunity yet to see how the soil comes out, as we were planning a wedding this year, and I (sadly) did only bare bones fall cleanup, but before leaving for the wedding, I could see lots of what looked like nice soil in there! The beauty of this system is that there's an outlet for finished compost - you just take the cap off the end of the unit, and out comes soil. I'll post pics in the spring of what comes out, but so far, I'm very happy!

Old Growth Joined: 14 Jan 2004 Posts: 179

It's a little sad how excited I am to see what comes out of your composter! lol

I asked my husband what he thought about getting a composter, and he basically mirrored Ark's 2cents. Told me he would bring me home a barrel and I could have the kids kick it around the yard a time or 10.

Like our neighbors don't think we're crazy enough as it is, but hey, if it works!

I'm not sure how much compost we would really put into it though, since almost all of our kitchen waste goes to our chickens. They're pretty good lil' composters, too though.

Plantlet Joined: 22 Feb 2008 Posts: 35

A friend of mine is very generously gifting me with her compost tumbler. She's moving and doesn't want to take it halfway across the country with her. Yay!

Since I'm new to the whole idea of composting, can I just throw all my kitchen scraps in there? What about the dried up dead tomato plants I had in my veggie beds and didn't get around to removing before the snow came?

Posted: 16-03-09 2:17

Hi CoquinaShells,

Sorry I can't help with advice about a compost tumbler as I've never used one.

No, you can't throw ALL your kitchen scraps into the compost pile. NO meat, grease or fat. You can use egg shells, veggie scraps and uneaten food if it didn't have fat, butter, margarine, etc. added. Fruit, coffee grounds and old bread are great too. All that stuff I just mentioned are called greens as they contain nitrogen, sort of because they were basically still alive when you put them in. Do be sure to add browns which contain carbon, such as shredded paper, shredded newspaper, sawdust, straw, dried leaves and the like. The more the stuff you add is chopped up,the more quickly it will decompose.

If your tomato plants have any fungus on them I would suggest you trash those, after all they have been in the garden for the winter.

Here's some helpful info on what to compost. There are also other helpful pages there too.
http://vegweb.com/composting/what.shtml

Newt

Plantlet Joined: 22 Feb 2008 Posts: 35

thanks Newt! Wow, lots of info! I knew the bit about meat and fats, I figured they'd go rancid.

Looks like I have some reading to do Smile

Posted: 16-03-09 13:17

CoquinaShells, you are so very welcome! I hope someone responds about the tumblers. I've read many reviews and some folks seem to love them and some don't.

Newt

Joined: 20 May 2009 Posts: 5 Location: Northern Colorado

My boyfriend just built us a compost tumbler out of a huge wooden spool. He took out the center and just used the round ends, then nailed 2x4s around the circumference of the circles and built a little door with hinges. The thing is HEAVY, but it is going to hold a lot of compost. He mounted it on a strong metal pole and is using some concrete blocks to hold it off the ground, which I would not necessarily recommend because it doesn't seem like the most stable arrangement. But no one has been flattened by it yet, knock on wood. The only problem with it was that once we got a huge amount of grass clippings, leaves, and kitchen waste in it, it was too heavy to turn. He solved this by nailing additional 2x4s at intervals around it and now is able to use them to get the leverage needed to spin the darn thing. If he could do it over, he said he would use 1x4s to make it lighter...

If you have the space, you could also just roll it in the ground instead of mounting it on blocks. Just don't get in its way!

Posted: 17-06-09 9:53

If you don't have tons and tons of kitchen-garden waste, you could just do a simple worm compost bin and let the worms do the work. You can make your own out of one of those plastic totes or there are some not so expensive ones all ready to go. This one works just fine for us http://www.organicgardenworks.com/2009/06/13/vermicomposting-guide.aspx.
You just add the waste and the worms eat it, pooping out some very rich castings. I just have a big pile of yard waste mixed with horse manure that I leave alone until it's done and feed my kitchen waste to the worms. All that turning is back breaking, even with a tumbler.

Posted: 07-09-09 8:42

We have a compostumbler- the smaller one. I really like it because I see how much faster things seem to break down. It actually gets turned, as opposed to our old pile, which never got turned. It advertised you could get compost in 14 days, but things had to be shredded pretty small to start with, turned once a day and add nothing during that time. And you had to start with a full bin.
That sounded like a bit too much work, so we figured we'd fill it and then let it work. We put too many old leaves in so it kept stalling (too much brown), so kept adding green. Now its getting full and heavy. Lots of compost to come out soon! But it's taken all summer to accumlate that much.
I view it as a bottomless garbage for our scraps, and hope to have something good to show for it in a couple, few weeks, now that we've decided to stop adding to it.
However, kitchen scraps are piling up, as well as other garden greens that usually get thrown in there. So we've started a pile next to the tumbler!! If money was no issue, a second tumbler would be great! If we had stopped adding to the tumbler midsummer, we'd probably have compost ready to spread!
One thing to note is the tumblers are not recommended to have stuff in them over winter, so you have to put your compost someplace else (hopefully the garden) over winter and start again in spring.