Composting in a bucket

The house I live in is not exactly spacious, which means I don't have room for a compost pile. With one child in private school and a second starting next year, money is also very tight, which means I can't afford to spend money on luxuries like a garbage can to use for composting. So, as with everything else related to my gardening projects, I was forced to get creative.

Luckily, I have an abundance of mop buckets. We got two brand new ones for free when we bought laundry soap a few months back. It was some kind of promotion. So, I appropriated one of the news ones and our old mop bucket to use for composting.

Composting Material Sources

I have tried this two different ways, but both centered around leaves picked up from around the neighborhood. My daughters love going for walks, so we decided to make the walks functional. Both girls carried their small sand pails and I had one of the mop buckets. As we walked around they would pick up any leaves that caught their fancy. Then when their pails filled up they would dump them out into the mop bucket I was carrying. When that filled up we would head home to shred the leaves.  This usually meant the kids would start to help, but they would soon get bored and get up to run around outside and play. I would be left to shred leaves alone.

How I shred the leaves

Shredding the leaves usually involved a pair of safety scissors, which was not exactly efficient, but it gave me something productive to do while sitting outside watching them run around, ride bikes or play. I once jokes that my neighbors must have thought I was nuts for sitting there cutting dried up leaves into a bucket. I am sure that was once true, but I have since been asked by a couple of people why I was doing it and knowing the grapevine on this block, that explanation has spread up and down the street. They also know that I have a worm bin, why and also that I am gardening. I am routinely asked what my plants are and I have gotten used to pointing out which are which. I have also started grouping them together to make that explanation a little less painful.

Oh yeah. I just remembered

Before the leaves collecting walks started, I used to get my leaves from two big bushes in front of my house. Whenever I would prune them I would strip the leaves off and then cut them up. The problem was they were all still alive and I wanted some organic matter that was already dead and drying out. That is when I got the idea of letting my girls run up and down the street collecting leaves. Well, actually it was their idea because they started bringing them to me. I suggested getting their sand pails to make their collection efforts easier. Before I knew it I had a mop bucket full of dried up mango leaves and okra leaves and God knows what else. It was after I finished processing those that the walks began.

Back to Experiment 1

Anyway, I guess I wasn't cutting the leaves small enough because despite keeping them good and wet and turning them everyday, it just seemed like I wasn't making any progress.

So, I started taking clumps of the decomposing leaves and cutting them up really really fine. I kept those in a small container to see what would happen. Sure enough that worked out well.

Experiment 1 Updates

About a week ago I decided to give up on trying to compost that first set of leaves. So, I dumped them into the garden bed in front of my house and started adding food scraps to it. Some of the food scraps go into my worm bin, but most of them go into the garden bed. That dirt out front is really sandy and not very good quality. So, I am hoping that by being out in the elements it will help it to decompose faster and that it will attract more worms that I can stick into a second worm bin I want to start.

Experiment 2

That is when I started the second bucket. Any leaves that went into that bucket got cut up much smaller. I would say on average they are less then half the size of a dime. Many are even smaller than that because I had another little boy helping me at one point and he was really diligent at ripping them (with his bare hands) into very small pieces. I guess he didn't quite understand my instructions.

Anyway, I am waiting till the bucket is at least 3/4 full before wetting them down to actively get them to break down. Collecting large quantities of leaves is easy. Getting them shredded is the hard part. I can't afford any type of a machine, so I am forced to do it by hand. That's fine by me because it is relaxing, even if it is tedious.

At any rate, from this point forward this post will be about experiment 2.

UPDATE: November 25, 2015

Well, it's time to get this started. I had a full bucket of finely cut leaves and as promised I added some water to it. I allowed it to sit for a day, but then I stole some of the leaves to use in the garden. I still have half a bucket left, but I couldn't let this sit any longer. I need compost.

UPDATE: November 30, 2015

This morning I woke up late (1030 AM) to put the plants outside in the sun. When I finished I remembered that it has been almost a week since I added water and I forgot to turn it during all that time. Well, predictably, what happened was, it went anaerobic.

I had not expected that to happen, and I should have, because the top inch or so of leaves was dried out.  When I started turning the leaves I noticed a nice puddle of water at the bottom. I guess all the water just sunk down allowing the top to dry out.

As I turned it I got a good whiff of that anerobic bacteria. UGH! Not pleasant and certainly not when you just woke up. LOL LOL  Anyway, I kept turning it to try to get the dry leaves at the top to rotate to the bottom to soak up that water down there. It wasn't a lot of water, but it was enough to get all the leaves wet.