[barbazoo]

I highly recommend vermicomposting which involves hundreds of even thousands of little worms. I have a HungryBin and don't even need a green bin anymore, at least not for kitchen waste. What you get is compost which is great for gardening and worm tea which is great fertilizer.

[tharkun__]

Sorry for picking you specifically ;) there's many of these posts here.

I do have to ask though. You mention it's good for gardening so I gather you have one. You mention vermicomposting which sounds like you specifically bought worms and use them in the HungryBin?

Can you elaborate on why?

Personally I just have a bunch of 2x10s in a corner of the garden and we throw all of or organic waste in a there. In fall I add all of the leaves from the trees. In spring I have compost I spread in the garden. I did literally nothing else except for turning it from time to time. Sometimes it gets hot and smokes. All by itself. I don't do anything special. Lots of worms in there too. All by themselves.

Most of our neighbors put their green bins out every week and in fall they put lots and lots of paper bags with leaves out. Why?

[barbazoo]

We only have a small garden so I don't have enough brown waste to get to the right ratio of brown to green. I might be wrong though but that's why I think a conventional compost wouldn't work as well. What I like about the worm bin, is that the wormies are perfectly fine with a very high ratio of green waste to brown. I also haven't had any issues with smell, in winter I even have the bin in my garage, a friend of mine has his in the kitchen. At the same time, obviously that's a property of vermicomposting, not of the HungryBin specifically.

> Most of our neighbors put their green bins out every week and in fall they put lots and lots of paper bags with leaves out. Why?

I agree, especially when it's so easy to compost at home with a little bit of space.

[tharkun__]

Not trying to pick on you here but I bet you would also do well in the garden directly, without the need for a bin, bought worms or doing it indoors. I guess that's more of a 'how to do composting if you don't actually have a garden' technique.

Not sure what conventional composting is, if not 'throw it all onto a pile and let it do its thing' ;) That's how my parents and all our neighbors did it too.

I definitely don't bother with ratios. I only learned about those very recently actually. As mentioned, it sometimes gets hot, sometimes it doesn't. When it does I guess I got the right ratio by 'accident' .

As in, in fall there's a lot of brown matter added from the leaves, in winter it eventually freezes (but I keep piling on the green matter from all the bananas, oranges, potato peels etc.) while most of the immediately 'active' green matter is added during spring and summer and it eventually reaches the perfect ratio as I keep turning the pile and I get periods of 'hot composting'. The worms probably don't like it at all when it starts smoking lol.

In between I bet most of the work is done by the worms that naturally occur in the soil and love feasting on all this organic matter. Naturally occurring fungi will also help I bet. We get lots of different kinds of mushrooms in the lawn at different times of the year.