Rodent Resistant Composter

Step 6 Put Composter Together

1. Put your finished wire mesh basket in an area that works for you.

Things to consider:
- It's going to compost much faster if it is exposed to sun and protected from the wind. We have ours on our driveway and it has no smells or flies and is currently 115 degrees on top and 135 degrees in the middle.
-The compost will leach resins from the wood or compost leachate when it rains, so you might want to have it over dirt to absorb that.  We don't really care that every now and then resins from the woodchips run down our driveway, but we're inconsiderate tenants.
-It's going to be too heavy too move after you've filled it, so decide while it's empty.

2. Put the smaller cylinder of mesh inside the larger mesh basket.

4. Fill the outer ring with woodchips. Cedar takes forever to decompose. Hardwoods decompose faster. This outer ring of carbon material (wood chips in our case) will get incredibly hot as it decomposes if it is exposed to nitrogen (like urine), which is useful if you want to get your compost pile to decompose fast.  1 pound of woodchips can absorb about 3 lbs of urine easily.  Urine is sterile unless it is provided by someone with kidney problems or contains blood (yuck).

5. Fill inner ring with  10" of carbon then a mixture of compost that is 30 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen. We mix our kitchen scraps with all our household paper waste and we still have to add sawdust to get the ratio right. 

6. After each addition of material to the inner ring top the compost chamber with wood chips or sawdust to keep critters from investigating the pile. We even made a mesh lid to keep critters out, but 12" of sawdust or woodchips would do the trick as well.

In this picture you can also see that we added ventilation to our last compost pile to increase bacterial activity, but that's another story you can read about on our blog where we talk about all things related to decomposing matter.  In this photo there's also an inner wire mesh bin in addition to the wire fence cylinder, which proved to be a waste of time.  The inner mesh bin created an air gap between the wood chips and the compost which cooled the compost down.