Winter Composting - Ideas?

I'm looking into indoor composting options for winter. My outdoor compost piles are frozen solid for 6 months of the year, making it  a painfully slow process.

So, I'm looking into indoor composting options for winter.

The rules, for indoor air quality, protection of indoor plants from insect pests, and domestic harmony:
1. No smell
2. No mold
3. No bugs

All of these are a challenge, because I'll be bringing in outdoor materials brimming with smell, mold, and bugs.

Option 1: Sealed System. 20 litre/5 gal. pails with lids and what I think is the optimal mix and moisture. They will be sealed and sit in the nice warm furnace room; and be taken outside, stirred and aerated, during warm spells.

Option 2: Large volume but less perfectly sealed version of above, using 75 litre Rubbermaid trash bins with tight fitting lids. Same maintenance cycle.

Option 3: Vertical Worm Bin, using 75 litre Rubbermaid trash bins.

My stirring device will be a long "corkscrew" used as ground anchors for securing tarps to the ground. Screw it down and pull straight up. Easy.

Thoughts?

If you can mix up the beneficial organisms now, you could mix up a winter`s worth of bokashi bran/sawdust, and fill up those buckets (you can find info on doing this at a site called newspaper bokashi, using just milk and molasses and whatever medium you want to use. Sawdust is free for me while bran is $$$, so I go with sawdust). Then when spring comes, you bury the contents in your garden and within 2 weeks you can plant on it. It's what I do currently, just on a rolling basis during the year.
Bright side, no stirring or mixing.
The only drawback I can see is that the buckets should have a tap in the bottom to drain out the liquid (which is why you wouldn`t use the 75L barrels to do bokashi). When you drain, there will be smell, but you could take them outside to drain and bring them back in and as long as your taps are in good working order and you avoid leaks/spills it won't be bad. Other people use 2 nesting buckets, one drilled and another to catch the liquid in (like a mash tun in beer making), and that seals relatively well to avoid stench.
No bugs.
If any mold, it`s within the sealed bucket.
If you're careful you can do it with out smell.

I've been experimenting with indoor composting - just by throwing food scraps into a bag/bottle/bucket and going a bit heavy on carbon (I'm using sawdust), shaking/mixing it daily, it seems to be working well and hasn't had any bad smells or pests. It does have white (and rarely blueish-green) mold, but here's what my oldest bag/compost now looks like.

The only thing I am careful to avoid adding are meats and dairy - while I think they would break down fine, I don't want to risk any bad smells or pests attracted to those.

Logan Byrd wrote:I've been experimenting with indoor composting - just by throwing food scraps into a bag/bottle/bucket and going a bit heavy on carbon (I'm using sawdust), shaking/mixing it daily, it seems to be working well and hasn't had any bad smells or pests. It does have white (and rarely blueish-green) mold, but here's what my oldest bag/compost now looks like.

The only thing I am careful to avoid adding are meats and dairy - while I think they would break down fine, I don't want to risk any bad smells or pests attracted to those.

I would recommend making some charcoal to add as well.  It's very simple to make small quantities of charcoal, it will remove any smells, and you will be rewarded with biochar for your garden when it is finished composting.

Trace Oswald wrote:I would recommend making some charcoal to add as well.  It's very simple to make small quantities of charcoal, it will remove any smells, and you will be rewarded with biochar for your garden when it is finished composting.

That is a good idea! I don't have anywhere I can burn stuff, but since I'm making compost in small batches, I can buy some aquarium charcoal and add it.

I wonder -- for indoor composting, it occurs to me that a 3" layer of dry, finely ground char could act as a "cap" to separate the composting activity (and various bugs/mold/stink) from the interior house air. Hmm.

I spent several years in shared apartments with people not knowing I had a worm bin in my bedroom. If you go heavy on paper/carbon and cover well,  it's smell and bug free.

I now buy a bag of wood pellets for the carbon source, which is less finicky than tearing paper. One bag does me 3?4?5? Pails. Worms do better with a bit of calcium carbonate, but i usually just put in crushed eggshells.

I am a worm composter so I always say, "You should use a worm composter!"  Attached "should" be a picture of a 11-gallon flow-thru that I make.
I also make 23 and 55-gallon models.  Your 75-litre rubbermaids can be made the same way.  I use wire to support the temporary false floor but have used conduit, pvc and garden stakes in the past.  Freeze or nuke the food waste (fly eggs), cover with 4-6" of shredded paper/cardboard (smell) and mix the food and shredded up (mold) and you'll be golden - black golden!

I've read this thread a couple of times though I might have missed this.

Douglas, it has been two years since you started this thread.

What did you end up doing and how has winter composting worked out for you?

I haven't really come up with a winter solution. The volumes I need to handle would require bringing in half a dozen full size rubbermaid trash bins inside.

Meanwhile I've been sourcing municipal compost and managing my compost piles more intensely. I'm currently using three bins made by cutting 1000L IBC cube liners in half, plus a huge slow compost pile.

Douglas,

For my part, my thoughts are to build the compost pile not so much for its own compost, but rather for the fertility the pile can add to the soil/garden bed.

I would find a nice, unused part of the garden and lay down straw.  I would then lay down my compost to a layer of about 6”-12” on top and cover with another layer of straw.  Secure the straw if necessary.  Maybe cover with chicken wire.

To be clear, I would not expect the compost to be finished by Spring.  Instead I would hope to see that the soil/garden bedding and the compost start to merge together.

My experience is that the best, most fertile soil is that which sat under a compost pile and that simply hosting a compost pile was worth more than the compost itself—all the microbes mix and work together on their own with no help needed from you.  Why not take advantage of this symbiotic relationship and let the compost fertilize your ground just by sitting there?

My 2 cents,

Eric