This forum is for pictures; you may want to post on the compost discussions forum to get replies. Good Luck!

i have the same question as kimmsr: how could you possibly use 10 yards of compost per bed?? i have a 40 foot by 16 ft garden with 8 3.5 by 16 foot beds. my whole garden is 640 square feet. even if i put 6 inches of compost down, 11 yards would cover the whole place. if i only put 3 inches down per year then i can get by with 5 or 6 yards. i wire 5 pallets together as a hot compost pile and in about 8-12 weeks (spring summer and fall) i have finished compost. about halfway through the process i reduce my box from 5 pallets to 4 pallets. a 4 pallets box full to the top is about 2 yards of compost. so to never buy compost i'd have to cycle through a box that large three times per year. it is a huge amount of material to fill a 5 pallet box. i have a free unlimited supply of relatively weed free horse manure, plus newspapers and wood chips and etc. but even if you have that much stuff on hand you still have to assemble the thing and then turn the thing occasionally. i get paid about 25 dollars an hour at my day job... it takes me about 10 hours of hard labor to produce 2 yards of compost. given all of this, 25 dollars per yard for good quality compost is an incredible deal. and i have almost just talked myself out of composting... if i didn't think it was cool/fascinating, like conservation, and think my homemade stuff is better than theirs i wouldn't do it. -jon

Don't get too ambitious too quickly. Take your time and try one thing at a time, say a year with each method or system. I started with a plastic bin. Then a tumbler for quite a bit of money. Now I use mesh bins made of hardware cloth, about $20. They hold lots more material and are easy to turn. The larger bins also handle problematic stuff like fish and kitchen waste better than the earlier two systems. There is no one 'right' system for everyone. Differences in yards, tastes, space, etc., make for different compost methods. A person/family with not much of a yard, but a love of fishing might select a indoor worm bin as the 'best' method. I love my large, cheap mesh bins. The plastic bin sits unused in the country; the tumbler rusted thru after four years.

Hi shooflypets, There are no "stupid" questions, we all have questions and we all have answers, hopefully, if we converse with one another, we will grow closer, by meeting each others needs. Now...onto your "not so stupid" question.... I think most landscape/gardening stores have "compost thermometers" ,they are about a foot long, and around 20.00 I have a very large pile so I made my own 4' long thermometer. You just purchase a Digital Bar-B-Que meat thermometer (around 10.00), and use Heat-Shrink to secure it to a large piece of Rigid wire...VIOLA