Monday, March 12, 2012

DIY Compost Bins from Scrap Fence Pickets & Cedar Balusters: Hibbs House Project Week 2012

My parent's volunteered their time to come help out with some project's around our house this week. I've got a ridiculously long list of projects lined up for them so get ready for some awesome projects all week long.

Spreading out the seed I bought for the lawn last fall (when you really should seed a cool season lawn) was on the list, but we really needed to rake up the leaves on the lawn and mow the grass a little shorter before we put down the seeds.

I'd been meaning to make a New Zealand compost bin to collect all those leaves in. I even bought the cedar balusters I needed to turn the pile of cedar fence pickets leftover from our fence project last spring into those bins a couple of weeks ago. I hadn't quite gotten around to actually building them though. (I also built several raised beds from some of the other leftover pickets we had. You can read about those here.)

On Saturday morning, my dad and I got to work. We used a plan from my copy of The Vegetable Gardener's Book of Building Projects.


For $15 in cedar balusters we made a 4'x4'x2 1/2' bin for compost.


That's 40 cubic feet of compost space. That's all the leaves off of a quarter of our entire yard in there with the contents of our old dilapidated compost bin. There's still a good foot of space in there.


I still had a ton of pickets and my dad had the ingenious idea to make couple more bins sharing the sides. We almost finished 3 of them, but we ran 4 balusters short. I bought the balusters Sunday night, but I didn't get them finished before I took pictures this evening. 


I have a LOT of raking to do.

Here's a little hint about another project I'll post about just as soon as it's done. It's AMAZING.

2 comments:

  1. The skinny wood pieces on this cross are lathe pieces from our 1932 schoolhouse.yard fencing

    ReplyDelete
  2. This project is still on going as i only have the front of the fence finished. fence replacement

    ReplyDelete

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...