Pretty awesome post here! Too bad it didn't get more engagement, the rewards are great but not a lot of compost lovers it seems lol.
We compost ourselves and it's awesome! We don't do it in the same manner you do, we live in a condo complex so we don't really garden. We tried to do something on our deck but it was too difficult to manage it in the pots where we couldn't rely on the soil having the different nutrients the plants needed without a bunch of intervention from us.
What we have been doing consistently though over the past number of years is composting! We have a bunch of buildings and there are some pretty awesome wooded areas where there is a lot of vegetation and animal life around. We have been composting to the area for years and have had some people complain recently but it's a little annoying. You would rather the food waste be thrown into a trash bin, into a landfill and end up causing more methane emission than keeping it back there where the animals and bugs can eat it, and it get recycled back into the soil? We backed off a little bit and it was very painful but I threw 3 bags of compost into the trash before I started back up in the cloak of darkness lol. Sad what we have to do to save a little bit of unnecessary waste!
I had considered buying one of the composting bins that you can have covered and has a paddle wheel in it so you can turn it over like that. A bit more effort for little reward considering we don't use the stuff actively lol. It's great though to learn and know that actively turning it over keeps the smell down. I don't mind the smell but my wife would certainly not be thrilled by it so knowing that trick will be something I would employ for sure!
I am really looking forward to being able to do this type of stuff when we get a house with some land. 80 bags of the stuff from the hardware store is a really crazy amount of money you could save!
Thanks for the interest, glad you enjoyed it! I don't really get a lot of engagement on my posts, generally. I've been told my whole life that I'm cold, unapproachable, and intimidating... apparently those traits somehow manifest through social media as well :D
Congratulations on your continuing compost quest! I would recommend, if you desire to do more gardening, that you plant some things on top of one of your compost piles. With such a nutrient dense base, you can get a lot of produce in a small area. Do a DuckDuckGo search for Square Foot Gardening, and you'll quickly see the many possibilities.
The drum composters are pretty great, and the internet is full of posts that will show you how to build your own from a variety of materials. If you're just trying to not throw away kitchen scraps, you can also compost quite a bit in 5 gallon buckets. Again, there is a bunch of info about that on the internet, and I hope to do a post about it myself someday.
Thanks for stopping by, hope to see you back again!