A while back I reported on buying a NatureMill, a computerized indoor composter. We've had it about three months, and here's our report:
- Follow instructions! Our initial batches were of low quality because we didn't add enough of what the NatureMill folks call white compost - paper, sawdust - things other than produce. Too much produce in a batch yields compost soup. John to the rescue: we add sawdust to each batch. Works like a charm.
- Don't follow instructions! The NatureMill documentation is awful. Parts say to fill the hopper full and others say don't overfill. What's the truth: don't fill it full at all. We had a batch that wouldn't empty completely because the hopper was too full. Mixing in sawdust helps tremendously.
- You can get excellent compost out of the thing. In less than a week! This is the important part. After debugging our problems we've gotten the thing to work extremely well. Living in a cold climate in winter is a problem for outdoor composting. Now we can process our kitchen scraps year-round, and dump the compost into our outdoor bins for later use. Because the NatureMill is so efficient at reducing bulk our outdoor compost bins are filled a fraction of their capacity.
On balance - we love it!
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