to tumble or not

[diggerdelaney]

has anybody used one of those composters that you have to tumble if so how did it turn out or have you tried and failed thinking of getting one

[rustylady]

Never tried one, sound really good but the price is somewhat offputting.

[BarleySugar]

I had one once, but it did have quite a large turning circle, so needed a good bit of room. Also I found it quite heavy to get the thing to tumble. In the end I gave it away, it wasn't very successful for me, but others must get on OK with it, because this was some time ago, and they are still being sold

[Woofster]

I have a compostumbler. It was expensive and not the easiest thing to assemble. It has produced reasonable compost and the good thing is you can look at it easily and see how it is doing. It helps if you have it in a sunny spot. I probably have not used it as well as it was intended so don't feel qualified to give it a thorough review.

[Nicos]

We tried it for a year and gave it away!
We would forget to turn it, and when we did black liquid poured out everywhere ( superb stuff but not when staining the patio!)
Even the peeps we gave it to tried it for a year and gave up on it!!

[Two_Sheds]

You can't beat a good ole heap, really.
All these newfangled plastic doodads aren't able to improve on the original, though the manufacturers try and try to part you from your hard-earned cash.

[Protea]

I have looked at them and been tempted but they're so expensive! I also think that unless you have lots of green material to compost (all the time) then its not really going to work. It seems that you need to add it all at once, then do the tumbling thing, and its ready, the put the next load in. Somehow this doesn't seem realistic for most families who have little and often material for composting.

I'm sticking to a couple of daleks at home and a pallet contraption at the plot.

[bridget mc laughlin]

I would rather have a good ole heap and a wooded bin.Those tumblers sound expensive.

[HappyMouffe]

We've got 2 - bought one a few years ago, for use in the garden, and it produces compost really rapidly in the summer (around 8 weeks). We bought a second last year. Much neater in our smallish garden than heaps and much more rapid than 'daleks'.

We've had no problems with adding 'little and often' but we do add lawn clippings quite frequently through spring, summer and autumn. The tumbling helps mix this 'wet' material with the drier material, so largish amounts of lawn clippings still produce good compost for us, rather than producing a slimy anaerobic mess in a 'dalek'.

Not cheap, but we wouldn't have any other type of composter in the garden. We have bog-standard compost heaps on the allotment, but composting is incredibly slow that way for us as we don't do a lot to mix the heap etc as you're supposed to do. We can have four lots of compost a year out of a tumbler each year.