On Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:48:53 -0800 (PST), Higgs Boson
wrote:

et. seq. You would then arrive at the content of the former bottom
square, which would in theory be ready-to-use compost. (There must be
an easier way to describe this?)

Inverting the contents.

The box type bins I've seen have an opening at the base you can shovel
the bottommost compost out of - slide straight in, pull out (think
pizza oven). if you really needed to rotate the compost in a bin, you
could shovel about a third out from the bottom and drop it on top, and
a week or two later, repeat the effort. This doesn't do a complete
inversion, but is reasonable. There is no need to relocate the bin.

Rotating a 50 gallon drum on an axle is a LOT easier.

I did it once or twice, but found it a pain; not great results. Also,
my gardener kept putting in too much stuff, causing the composter to
bulge at the seams.

Well, I think there's two sorts of home composting : someone with a
handful of garden clippings, plus the kitchen debris, and then someone
with an acre+ of yard to maintain, with tree limbs, leaves, grass
cuttings, and vegetable garden debris. The little composter can't
keep up with ALL of that - but if you put certain debris in there, you
can at least have a fast composter for some of your debris.

Now the City has announced that food waste may be added to the yard
waste bins. Result should be will be that their next quarterly free
distribution of
(lovely, fine-textured compost) will be even richer because of the
food waste.

The composting operations at municipal facilities are dealing with
such large volumes of compost that they've got no trouble maintaining
a high breakdown temperature. They can probably handle a small
quantity of meat in the compost bins without grief.

Anybody else think their municipality would set up such a program?

We've had green bind with the trash outfits for 2+ decades (the county
where I used to live was a very early adopter of curbside recycling,
not that reducing the landfil consumption rate meant that we'd pay any
lower a trash bill). With the exception of brambles, and sometimes
thorny citruses, I don't take any greenwaste to the landfill - all of
that goes into the compost. If my inlaws need a hand pruning the
garden, I haul my trailer over, we prune, and I load the stuff into my
trailer and haul it over here (it's always too much to manage in their
greenbin alone anyway) - hock it in the compost pile and let it do me
some good.

But then, I picked up about 5 cubic yards of composted horse manure
this past weekend (about 3400lbs I had to shovel out of my trailer in
two trailerloads) and have an order in for 40 cubic yards (delivered
by a semi trailer dumptruck with an extension trailer) of composted
duck manure - my favourite garden amendment. I'm always working to
add organic material to the garden to improve the tilth - it's not
enough to compost everything on site, I need MORE. g