Small Scale Composting

We're planning a garden this year, and I'm just so excited.  This is our very first attempt at keeping plants alive outside to any great extent and I have high hopes.

But everything I've read about growing big, healthy, amazing vegetables seems to suggest that the way to dinner plate sized tomatoes and green peppers as large as a baby's head is compost.  As in rotted vegetation.

Like most children of former hippies and back-to-the-landers, I grew up with a composter in the backyard.  It was a big, black heavy plastic monstrosity and we fed it our kitchen scraps as though sacrificing to some sort of pagan God.

photo source

There were very specific rules governing what could and could not be given to the composter.  Meat was a big no-no.  Potato peels were okay.  There was a debate raging about eggshells and teabags.  Once a year my parents spread a tarp on the lawn and emptied the composter.  Dirt went on the garden, large pieces of stuff that hadn't rotted got chopped up smaller, worms were added to the resulting debris and it went into the composter again until next year.

Now that our own garden is going to require the same delicious dirt I want to get started on my composter - but a big black plastic box is not in our budget.  What to do, what to do?

I decided to try a 72 L heavy plastic storage tote.  I had one where the nice snapping handles had snapped off, making the tote very much not handy for carrying around anything, but the tote itself still just fine.  Reading up on the the composting world (there's a composting WORLD out there, my friends.  People whose hobby it is to rot vegetables on their back porch.  I will never feel weird again.) I figured out that the process I was going to use was called Cold Composting, that it would produce useable soil in 6-12 months (please let it be closer to 6), that I needed to turn the stuff over every week, keep it warm and moist but not wet, and alternate layers of kitchen scraps with 'brown matter', also known as leaves and shredded paper.

Well, I am up for the challenge.  Behold our composter: