The week leading up to Halloween was a big one...we finally got our big composter built!
A week off from work and a few decent weather days allowed for the composter to finally get assembled...and just in time for leaf season to start in our area.
The composter is built out of almost entirely reclaimed or recycled materials. The wood is from pallets salvaged from a friend's business. The fence posts is posts from our old welded wire fence that we replaced earlier this year. Even the rope holding the pallets to the posts are reclaimed...they came on the hay bails we use for the animals. The only new items we purchases were two boxes of screws and 8 zip ties.
The scraps of leftover lumber will end up in our fire pit. Even all the pulled nails and screws will get recycled.
The composter is sited where one of our large coops sat before we moved it.
The sides of the composter is made up of four 7-foot long pallets. The back is two standard size pallets. Wood was salvaged from some other pallets to fill in the gaps. The idea is to hold the pile together as the chickens kick and scratch it up, while providing plenty of air flow to help with decomposition.
The finished composter is roughly 14 feet long by 7 feet wide by roughly 45 inches tall. That works out to about 367 cubic feet, or 13.6 cubic yards.
At market rate of about $35/yard, that's almost $500 worth of compost!
The composter already has a couple of wheel barrows full of food waste in it from last Friday's pickup, and we've started dumping the first few of what should end up being hundreds of barrels of fall leaves in.
Here are a few shots of the composter build "in flight":
