Grocery stores are probably not the best place to look for pallets since most of the pallets they get must be food safe and therefore expensive. Look for pallets at nurseries or any of the so called dollar stores or other businesses that recieve non edible products in large quantities. Keep in mind that to keep from having these items pile up many of these stores may have a contract with a company that makes mulch to haul them away.

The sign of a 'professional' composter must be the number of various bins they've used. Lloyd wins hands down! I used a wire mesh bin years ago but didn't like it. Too much work to pull it off and shovel all the compost back in. I've used various bins made of wood, lastly pallets. Apparently I also compost snow. I'm now just using a pile as it's easier to access and turn. Out here in the country no one cares how pretty it is as long as it's kinda out of the landscaped area. All winter I collect kitchen scraps in this 42" tall black container which we place about 20' from the house. Easier to shovel a path thru the snow to it instead of 100' to a pile. It has no bottom so after spring thaw I just lift it off, shovel into a wheelbarrow and move to wherever I want to make a pile, layering with wood shavings. My preferred method over the summer is to bury kitchen scraps and let the worms and microscopic organisms do their thing underground. Works the best for me and it's really easy.

When I found that pic in google, I was also so impressed . Then I thought about all cutting, screwing, begging my husband to help ....:))) and finally I end up with just cutting square foot hole on the side of the barrel, but not in the middle part ; I cut that hole in the top side part, so I could use it not just rotating horizontally, but also keep it vertical for a while. When it is time to rotate, I lay the barrel on the ground and roll it several times and let it sit horizontally. Then several day later I roll it again, or put it vertically. Actually it is not difficult at all. Sorry, I don't have my own picture of the barrel.

I've tried a variety of composting methods over the years. My first was a 3' circle of chicken wire (all I could afford). The side aeartion was nice, but I kept getting the pitchfork tines stuck in the chicken wire. After that, I made a compost garden. That was an 8' octogon raised frame bed with a 2'diameter chicken wire in the middle. I dumped compostable stuff in the chicken wire, never turned it, and let nurients leach into the surrounding soil to feed cucumbers up the chicken wire, tomotos outside that and bell peppers and flowers and the outer ring. Worked well actually. More interesting, I happened to drive past the old house and, 20 years later, the octogon is still there (but with roses)! When I moved, I tried a plastic cylander that you filled up, waited a few weeks, lifted up and moved to the side and refilled from the old pile and with new material. It actually worked OK, but it was a pain to move. I finally build a real double compost bin. 4x4x3'H. I got tired of turning the compost from 1 bin to another and they both ended up being filled. That meant I had to fork everything out of one bin onto the ground, move the 2nd bin into the 1st, and move all the outside stuff into the 2nd. And the rich supply of melon rinds, carrot and potato peels, etc from the kitchen waste was attracting critters. Well, if they were eating the best stuff, it wasn't doing me any good. I decided to re-think the whole process... I started to leave my grass clippings on the lawn (free fertilizer). And I decided that the trees needed the nutrients from the decomposing leaves, so I merely shredded them with the mower and left them in place. That way, they wouldn't blow away, and any blown-in leaves would add to the nutrient pile. But I still had kitchen waste and weeds to compost. So I got an aerated closed tumbler to use for the rich critter-tempting stuff. The built compost bins get all the weeds and old flower stems and such. With an occasional shovel of fertile garden soil, that stuff breaks down eventually. The compost tumbler doesn't make compost worth a darn, but it does hold the kitchen waste nicely until it is too far gone to attract critters. So then it goes onto the old compost bins (turning it in once a month isn't much trouble). The other half of my new system is to get free mulch from the County recycling Center. It is lousy mulch, but only becuase it is way too decomposed for mulch. It does however make great compost after it sits for a year. It is as good as the leaf compost available commercially. I even let all my chicken bones dry out in the basement, pound them into pieces, and toss them in the kitchen waste tumbler to break down (free bonemeal) So the lawn keeps its clippings, the trees keep the fallen leaves, the critters can't get at the tempting kitchen waste, the old compost bins slowly provide some compost with little effort, and the year-old "mulch" is good as soil. I'm actually accumulating more than I can use. Guess where it is going? On the lawn! I have one of those pushable mesh barrels to sprinkle compost over the lawn. Anything that doesn't fall out through the mesh goes back onto the compost bin. :)