Tapered Vermicomposter

December 6, 2006

Sometimes the composting material is reluctant to descend, even with a glissant garbage bag and some extra water poured down the inside of the bag.

The trick is to introduce a slight taper to the composter, narrower at the top than at the bottom.

This morning I took two two-foot sides (total four feet) of the large bin and rebuilt them as a four-sided, one foot per side, small-footprint tapered vermicomposter.

First off, A Second Use For Everything .

Simple as it sounds, I’m still re-using an earlier compost bin.

Here you can see the four panels lined up partway through assembly. I am moving one set of hinges from a point about ten inches down to a point flush with the edge. (The top edge. I’ve just turned the whole thing upside down to start work on the base).

Here is a wider view of four panels hinged along their top edge; all other hinges are removed. The base edge – right now up in the air – is unsecured:

I wrap the sides together to form a rough square. In this photo the edge resting on the ground has three hinges, but the fourth join is open.

I have used four small pieces of plywood to anchor the corners of what will be the base of the vermicomposter.

You can see that I have forced a one-inch-wide gap between each edge. Since the corners at the other end are flush, this base gap introduces a total of four inches of splay around the base. It’s not much of a taper, but it will assist the descent of material.

Here is a view from the outside. The taper is not terribly apparent in the photo, but it is all I’ll need to encourage descent of material.

Finally, put-away time. Here are the tools I used: one screwdriver, and a one-dollar packet of hinges. The screwdriver goes back in the toolbox. The cardboard hinge packet goes into the cross-cut shredder for vermicomposting.

If you’ve been tracking the date/time stamps in the photographs, you’ll see that the whole project took me about fifteen minutes. It’s eight in the photographs, but I started work before the first photo.

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