I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I didn’t have a good compost bin for my property up until fairly recently. I built a barrel composter some time ago, and… well, it doesn’t work for what we’re doing. I can’t feed it bulk material, and it doesn’t do a good job with our kitchen waste either.
(Comments from Blogger)
2018-07-07 by Unknown
Awesome job. I did similar thing but with Pallets i got free at the local grocery. Just screwed some leftover fence boards to hold the pallets together. I think yours will last longer and smell better!
2018-07-07 by Russell Graves
We’ll see. Yours was definitely cheaper!
2019-04-20 by Chloe B.
Boiled linseed oil have lots of toxic stuff in it… I cut all my pieces, treated them and just figured that one out…
2019-04-21 by Russell Graves
It can, though doesn’t always - it appears to be mostly mixed with solvents so it dries sometime this year.
I’m not that worried about it. I have a metal mesh inside the wood doing most of the support, so there’s just not that much contact area. For the difference in cost vs cedar, I’ll take the risk that my compost picks up a tiny bit of something from the oil - it’s going to be so dilute that it doesn’t concern me.
You wrote this blog in 2018, and asked us to ask you how it’s going in 5 to 10 years. Well, how’s it holding up? Do you like it? Is there anything to update about the entry?
This is fun… zombie post 
Even easier is using short fence t-posts to hold the pallets on 3 sides. The first bay takes 6 posts and subsequent bays take 4 posts - sharing a wall with a previous bay. Probably less than 10 minutes per bay to install. The front is tied on with baling twine/wire.
In a farm sort of setting these are ideal because you can pull the front and pallets/posts off from two sides and scoop the whole bin of finished/partially-done compost with a tractor bucket. (or pull the front and use a shovel/fork by hand)
The (slightly damaged) pallets are usually freely available and can be recycled in various on-site ways - burned or composted/buried where the nails won’t be a problem. (Just make sure to get pallets that aren’t treated with toxic stuff.)
Both this and the OP design are pretty attractive to rodents though so a worm-bin or something like that is probably best for spoiled vegetables/fruits/kitchen-scraps.
It’s holding up fine, though my aspirations of making a lot of hot, fast compost haven’t really gone anywhere. The hill typically either has green or brown, I can’t get both at the same time, so I have to really be working a year ahead on grinding stuff up and keeping it around, and that’s not ended up happening as reliably as I’d hoped.