2/2/26: Oviedo, Florida, Climate zone 10A

What I Need to Know About Composting

1. I know I can not just bury my food scraps directly into the ground because it attracts the raccoons, rats, and opossums at night where I live.
2. I know that to compost properly, I need to layer one part green material and one part brown material. Green material refers to fresh food scraps and the brown material refers to dry decomposed things like dry leaves, fine pine mulch, or soil.

1. Composting with a big plastic nursery pot

I recommend using at least a 25-gallon plastic nursery pot or even a 45-gallon pot.

2. Composting in 8-Gallon Pot

I recently tested try composting in a Gro Pro 8-gallon square pot.

3. Composting Directly in a Raised Bed

I made sure to lay a layer of chicken wire on the bottom before placing the raised bed on to prevent the underground critters from burying up into the raised bed to get the compost.

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First Mistake I Made

My first mistake in my journey of learning to compost was wasting money to buy this fancy cute double tumbler sold at Costco for $145. The compost tumbler is just good for looks folks. It does not work so well compare to my inexpensive items I use now. Anyway, it didn’t took long for me to learn the food scraps in that expensive fancy tumbler creates a very unpleasant rotting smell and attracts swarms of maggots. Gross! I no longer wanted to empty food into the compost tumbler and not to even mention go anywhere near it.