A COMPLETE Turn Over

Since my compost has sat for so long and no one tending it, I decided that I would do a COMPLETE turn. Up until this point I have been turning the top; about 1/4 of the way down the bin... Doing a complete turn meant pulling the entire bin out and flipping it over (bottom portion on top and vice versa). It turns out this was a much bigger task than I'd originally anticipated.

When you work and volunteer with two different organizations plus dog training on the weekends, you discover this doesn't leave a lot of time left over. Due to this, and the fact I am apparently extremely out of shape, it's been taking me a few days.

I threw a large piece of plywood on the ground in front of the box, in an attempt to contain the compost. I soon learned this was quite pointless.

I filled two garbage cans with the top half of the contents (which will now be the bottom) and began chipping away at the bottom half (which will now be the top). Because the box has sat for so long with no turning of the bottom, it started to become almost petrified. A lot of very compact pieces of dirt, grass, and twigs, including many very acidic pine branches that turned almost to a white ash and left a skeleton of the branches untouched.



I also found a lot of garbage in the compost... odds are these pieces were accidental, but let me state something clearly. The compost heap is NOT a garbage can! Plastics will NOT decompose in your compost heap!

This is still a work in progress... I set up a little fence to keep the dog out of compost, and there it sits until it is finished!