Originally posted by peppereater:
Weezie...glad you asked. I've been meaning to pick your brain for a while...
OH MY GOSH, PLEASE DON'T TELL MY HUSBAND THAT,
HE ALREADY THINKS IT'S BEEN PICKED CLEAN AS A WHISTLE..
First, I had to look up what you got...
Okay, this is a kinda complicated answer...
First off, this is the one I have
Mantis Twin Compost Tumbler And IMHO it has a few flaws, but I'm not sending it back....
They are all workable, but you've got to play with it and get the feel of it..
First, if you're used to a open~bottomed compost bin, it doesn't work the same way, I feel..
The open bottomed one's have worms and ground moisture and such to work and activate and keeps working the pile..
When you have a tumbler, it's not exposed to the critters that help break it down, or the moisture drawn up from the bottom...
(and different style bins work differently too..
*I have two other regular open~bottomed bins that work differently than the wooden one's I have..*)
I had alot of trouble with mine in the beginning..
Especially with the moisture...
*I did use alot of bottom of the bottles of Pepsi, but haven't had alot hanging around lately.*
But it just seems to stand still, especially if you use alot of leaves....
and they say to chop up everything, that's one of the flaws I think, but that is how you get the compost to work down in such a short time, cause the pieces are soooo small, and smaller pieces have more exposed edges, and the more exposed edges, means faster decomposition...
But you could stand there all day choppin'.. :rolleyes:
I use this product
Ringer Compost Plus I ended up putting it in, and it got those leaves rrrrrrrrrv'd right up and down....
(*it also came with the tumbler, but I have used it for years before that, on my large leave piles in the back yard.. I have my yard, mother's yard and a neighbors yard I use all the maple leaves from, and the pile is HUGE, so I have to do something to get it down a bit or come windy fall or
spring days the pile is back on the lawns...*)
Plus for me, I don't tumble mine everyday, I am way too busy for that...
But I have found that the more loads I've done in the bins, there's enough composted compost in the cracks and crevices's that that helps the next load start, cause all those goodie microbe's are in there... *and I sift the bins and put what hunks are tooooo big, into the new pile, which also helps active it too*
The other thing about mine is, I really dislike how it comes out.. most of the time I waste more
than I get in my wheel barrow, that has to be one size to fit under it...
And at least mine, does not come out in small pieces, *like it shows in the commercial/ad for it*, at least for liking, and you can never get it all out, but I guess for the next load~that's a good thing..
Yours looks like the mouth of it, is easier to empty than mine....
The one thing I liked about the compost tumbler is, I'm not sifting worms, it breaks my heart when I'm sifting and I grind one up in the sifting process... so, that's good, but the soil isn't as nice as the other ones'.. but I use it just the same....