Need more time! I'm anticipating seeing a lot of plastic remnants from plastic-lined paper products and perhaps unfinished "compostable" plastics. It's incredible how much material I've dumped into this thing over the last two years and it's still not only stayed the same size, but actually shrunk several inches!
It's been about a year since I stopped adding to this compost bin and started a new one. It'll be interesting to see what all is in here besides finished compost. I know I added plenty of paper products that most likely had a plastic liner sandwiched in between layers. There's also plenty of bags of leaf cleanup dumped in here, so there's most likely some pieces of litter. This doesn't bother me. The bottom line is I avoided the landfill with a massive portion of organic materials and now I will have some great compost, too.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0Hf_IcS_5U When is your compost ready to use? Some questions to ask yourself include: How does it look? Can you recognize any of the material? How does it smell? Is the material warm? Here I have a few different samples of compost...vermicompost, tumbler compost, commercial compost, and trench compost. What do you think of these samples? I feel like my tumbler compost and vermicastings could both go even longer before using them, but that they're still OK if I were to use them now. In fact, I'm going to use these samples for my next "Clash of The Composts!" experiment coming soon... stay tuned!