Stupid-Simple Composting System - Yardfully’s Geobin®!

hey dirt farmer J here from dirtfarmer j.com if you're a gardener then you know the importance of composting and anything you can do to make it easier faster and cost effective is probably going to be of interest to you let me tell you about a great system we found from yard fly the geen composting system stay [Music] tuned hey der fmer J here it's been about 5 years since we bought our yard full geobin compost bin and we love this system it's simple so much so that we put two of them in our property and we put one over here at the greenhouse which is about a half mile from our home it is a large volume uh compost system so it allows us to put a lot of materials into it and to turn those over to put back into the garden growing area or potting soil for pots that we potting up plants in that sort of thing well let me walk you through this very quickly we're going to make a a comparison number one just tell you why we like it and then I'm going to tell you a couple things that we think you just need to be aware of that are a little inconvenient and they're tradeoffs but bottom line we think it's a good system but we want you to be aware of some of the downsides as well well you see right here we purchased the geobin it comes in a rectangular long box because it is coiled up it's 3T wide oh about 10 or 12T long rolled up it's made out of hdp plastic and is available in three colors we chose the black but it's also available in green and tan uh depending on what your Decor is and what do you want to match or uh complement in your gardening space so they're all three available all three of the bins we have are black so it comes in that Carton and when you open the carton you're going to find that there's instruction manuals the keys that put it together and the material itself that's going to form the compost bin so the first thing you need to do because it was rolled up tightly the uh material has developed a memory it doesn't want to lay flat so we go ahead and roll it out put it on a concrete slab you could put on a driveway out on a gravel path somewhere it's going to get heated up pretty rapidly in the Sun so then it flattens out and becomes pliable and at that point then what you're going to do is uh turn it uh and put it into a roll now before we go to that though I want you to see the instruction sheets that come with it there's a nice set of instructions uh that come both front and back and then you can see here the set of keys that come with it and these keys are like butterfly keys that you insert in the slots uh and we'll show you how that all goes together so now that you've got uh the material where it's pliable and it isn't fighting you when you try to put it in a roll we form it into about a 3T diameter cylinder and you do that with about a five uh I would say five pattern overlap when you get the material you'll see what I mean uh and this allows two sets of keys to be installed one on the front overlap and one from the back uh and then we Orient the whole bin so that those overlaps are facing right out front so when we want to empty the bin or take out a part of it or deep turn it down the bottom we can open up a door so to speak work with the material clean things out close it back and continue to do the composting process so it works very well very simple and now here it is completed sitting in the lawn here getting ready to be placed where we're going to make use of it really simple straightforward and as you can see there's a lot of openings on the film that goes around very tough uh that allow both for ariation for o o exchange as well as moisture to be added to be draining out of it to maintain the right balance all right we're almost ready to put the bin to use what we did in our situation uh is we put it on top of a pallet to uh kind of give it a good foundation to sit on uh and to raise it up ariation to let it drain and that sort of thing so uh here you can see my friend Mike filling up the bin uh with binder weed with chopped uh trimmings and all that sort of thing from around the grounds here near the greenhouse uh as long as there's not mature weed seed in it stay away from anything like goat head or puncture Vine that sort of thing but you can use a lot of green material for your greens chopped hay uh bedding from the chicken Coupe all those sort of things shredded paper uh the greens and the Browns and you mix those up wet the whole thing down in this particular case you can see the finished result where the entire Bend was full we wet it down it been mixed as we went with throwing in organic material which was spent bedding plants that we need to recycle back in and I'm not kidding you in 2 and 1/2 days the pile had shrunk one half in that bin we measured the internal temperature it was 150 to 152° Really Cooking down that material very quickly so the critical Mass really makes sense pretty easy to do and we keep refilling it up with more material as you can see and that'll keep cooking down and then we'll sift it all out and start the fun all over again now that's all of the upsides are there any downsides well there's a few number one the top Edge on this tends to be really sharp and it's hard on your forearms if you're working over it that sort of thing so two ways you might overcome that one wear long sleeve s or long sleeve arm covers uh when you're working around this so it doesn't slice or become uncomfortable or take some sandpaper uh and sand the edges just to round them over so it softens The Edge that might be one way you do it all right the second thing is uh the keys that they provide I think they're a little minimalistic on that I think they could have been a little bit more generous with the keys I'd rather have some extra keys they might get lost uh and they're available you can buy them in five packs for about 10 bucks but I think they could have just included a few more to begin with that's my feedback to yard fly uh on that the third thing is it's 3T tall and if you do put it on a pallet if let's put it this way if you're height challenged it feels a little bit tall it's hard to get over into it to work with it Etc so if that's the case they do offer a mini composer that's 24 in tall still gives you a lot of volume in it but it's easier to reach over into the bin but you do sacrifice quantity or capacity in the bin but that option is available for you another thing that you have to keep in mind is the sides are very flexible so over time or when you're filling it you need to keep in the shape you want so I like the cylindrical shape but you may want it squared off a little bit or oblong in an area something like that you'll need to fill it and shape it as you go and then over time it'll have a tendency to shift a bit and if you're a bit OCD or that really bugs you then you're going to have to maintain that shape a bit as you go because it's not a rigid system it holds its shape by all the material in it so that's another thing to keep in mind uh the one other thing that I would mention because this is a high volume system uh it can be a little bit laborious to mix the uh the the um contents uh it's hard to dig into a little bit you have to unbutton it a little bit to really lift the material out it's hard to go over the edge and get down deep in it with a standard uh Pitchfork and so we've got some accessories uh that we know that you really like and what you can do is see this video right here that'll walk you through through our three favorite accessories for composting whether or not you use this system or not but it really makes a big difference in dealing with large amounts of compost and gives you better results and while you're at it check out the other video that YouTube thinks is perfect for you from our catalog we think you're going to enjoy it as well hey until the next time this is dir fmer J from direr j.com going out to make another batch of compost