Compost Death Star

A few weeks ago, my housemates and I bought a tumbling compost ball. It's pretty much the most amazing thing ever and it looks like a Death Star, which makes it even more amazing (because I am a Star Wars geek and now I have my own dark side of the garden). Most composts don't get turned over often enough or don't get enough oxygen inside, including our last compost bin at the previous house. Having a compost ball that you can roll around helps with turnover and mixing. The design even has little holes for oxygen to breathe in.

Another common problem that people have is an imbalance between the nitrogen-heavy material (your food scraps and garden greens) and the carbon-heavy stuff (dry leaves, newspapers, straw). Too much of one or the other slows down the decomposing process and makes the compost bin really smelly. So far, the compost ball seems to be working - no funky smells. We've left it in the sun to help decompose faster and have made sure to put in lots of newspaper. It'll be a couple more weeks before we get stuff to use in the garden though, so I'll post later about that.

My only problem with it is that the cover is kinda hard to open! It does come with a "key" of sorts, but it takes a certain amount of strength to pry the cover open, and if bits of food gets stuck at the top, that doesn't help.

Now for the exciting photos of the making of our compost ball!



The different "layers" of the ball



The holes for oxygen



Putting things together



How the oxygen gets in



Putting the middle parts together



Pat really likes the ball...



The completed Death Star!