Learning About Composting and How to Build a Compost Bin

Learning about composting and how to build a compost bin was the first thing we did to start our gardening journey.

Now we are going back to how this all started.

I’ve shared in an earlier blog and on our YouTube channel about how I started my first simple garden. I don’t know if you can really call it a garden though. It was more of like an urban type grow bag garden. Something like that – in the city!

DESIRE TO HAVE A GARDEN

Since we purchased our very first home with a pretty good sized backyard, I knew right away (before we even moved in) that I wanted to have a garden. Why? Because I love food! And really good food. So~ what better way to have good food that you actually grow yourself.

Well~ since then, it has been quite a learning journey of gardening. I plan to continue to share some of what we learned along the way on the blog and our YouTube channel. We hope that you will follow along to see the crazy adventures and accomplishments we made on our Little Pine Cottage urban homestead.

STARTING SMALL

In the beginning, I knew that I eventually wanted to build garden beds and start a real type of garden most people have. I wanted to start off small though because we had so many other projects that we were working on. Not to mention that I was working a full time job and we were living in a construction zone at the same time!

woman in construction zone fixer upper house

Starting a garden was really the last thing I should’ve been thinking about. But, I really wanted to do it! And I knew it would take time to learn and for plants to actually grow. If I could even get anything to grow at all! So, I decided to start them in grow bags and kind of tinker around with planting seeds. To see if I could grow them into seedlings.

I really wanted to learn the whole process of starting a garden with the soil and planting seeds and watching them produce something. But, to just do it on a much smaller scale to start. I knew that I eventually wanted to get into more of a raised bed type of garden later though.

Yet~ I would have to pull Nate away from his work around the house in order to have him help me build garden beds. I’m just not really good at tools and construction type stuff. But, I have the vision for it and then he gets to create it and help me with it.

man building wood raised beds for garden

COMPOST FIRST BECAUSE IT TAKES TIME

One of the first things I learned in my gardening research was to start composting right away. Even before you build your raised beds. Since it takes time to actually create soil from composting, it’s best to start as early as possible. So I thought~ maybe that will be the first thing that we do. And we did.

After all~ what else are you going to do with all your food scrapes and yard waste in the meantime? Let it all just go into the garbage and hauled off to a landfill somewhere? Oh~ no no no. There is a much better way and I’m happy to share the beauty of composting with you here!

I think the perfect time to get started with composting is in the fall or winter, depending on where you live. We are in Texas and sometimes it can still be around the 80’s in December! If you are in a colder region, fall would be the best.

Then you can just let your outdoor compost bin do its thing while you add your food scrapes, yard waste, and other materials to it during the fall and winter seasons. Letting it all cook up into a beautiful wonderful pile of almost finished soil by the spring (hopefully).

This will be the best organic homemade compost, soil, fertilizer you can get! Much better and cheaper than the stores for sure. And since it’s your own concoction to begin with, you will rest easy knowing what every ingredient was that went into it. Kinda like making homemade food versus getting take out!

I’ll share in an upcoming blog what you can do with unfinished compost as well. It’s really a delicious adventure and perfect timing for spring planting season. And if you are into starting a small scale urban garden or mini homestead~ this will be a fantastic experience for you to try some things out and see what works for you.

So, we decided to start composting first while we continued to think about our vision for the garden beds and the design of them. This gave me more time to research and figure things out. And time to buy seeds and start experimenting with them.

SALVAGED WOOD TO BUILD COMPOST BIN

Nate was such a great supporter (most of the time *wink*) with my garden and homestead dreams! He had a lot on his plate with renovations, but still took the time out to build me an outdoor compost bin.

He ended up sorting through his very organized pile and stash of salvaged wood from our older home renovation projects. Then he finally decided to just use some scrapes of our old and new house siding. Like smaller pieces that were cut off during our cottage siding renovations.

After tinkering a bit on the project, out popped a cute little 3x3x3 outdoor compost bin. Three feet on all sides. It was perfect for small space living, a smaller backyard, and just a smaller scale garden.

Hosea 10:12

Sow for yourselves righteousness; Reap in mercy; Break up your fallow ground, For it is time to seek the Lord, Till He comes and rains righteousness on you.

CHECK OUT OUR VIDEOS

Thanks for joining us on this journey! We hope that you will find inspiration watching us learn as we go while we’re attempting to renovate and rebuild this old small historic cottage mostly on our own. Stay tuned for more progress updates ahead!

You can also watch a video about this here.