The past couple of years we’ve dealt with using a pretty poorly thought out (actually not thought out, thus the reason it was a poor design) compost bin. I had used chicken-wire to create a couple of bins that were almost impossible to turn. Even with that poor design though we still were able to create some amazingly rich soil thanks to the power of nature and our willingness to nurture. After having heard for years about how shipping pallets make for great compost bin material we finally decided to “upgrade”. Over the past month we garbage picked a handful of shipping pallets. In the old days you could get shipping pallets from just about anywhere. Fortunately though most businesses are actually recycling/reusing them nowadays. I still didn’t have any real trouble sourcing the ones we used but it wasn’t as simple as it had been in the past.

Most shipping pallet compost bins are very rudimentary and are simply a matter of binding three together with twine or wire. You can see an example of how the Master Gardener’s build their pallet compost bins here [click]. Being that I can’t resist the opportunity to reinvent the wheel, I decided to disassemble and reclaim the wood from the pallets and then build our bin using the reclaimed lumber. I’m pretty happy with how it all turned out. Here’s my photo tour of the work. I spent about 4 hours on the project with most of that time spent reclaiming the wood with a brief design planning stage and a very quick build. SORRY PICTURE HOSTING GONE – WILL UPDATE WITH PHOTOS SOON

Step 1 – Gather Pallets:

Step 2 – Harvest the Raw Materials:

Step 3 – Layout the Design:

Step 4 – Nail and Trim:

Step 5 – Final Assembly:

And now it is time to start putting it to work.