Compost bins are worth their weight in gold for the organic gardener. 1 is ok, 2 are better and   with 3,4 or 5 and you are living the good life.

There is nothing wrong with getting the plastic ones from garden centres etc but by far the more acceptable ones are the ones you make yourself from recycled timber. For me it is so much more pleasing to be able to say I made that and best of all it was free. There is no waste products, no pollution, no energy used, except your own, and the home made one will be more aesthetically pleasing, well that's my view on the topic.

Make sure that the pallets are not the ones that are painted blue because these have a deposit on them and have to be returned to the owners. They are much stronger than others but they belong to someone else.

To start with one.

A good size is around 1m square. Oh look a pallet is about 1m square!!

What you will need.

4 pallets roughly the same size

4 pieces of wood approximatly1.5m long x 75mm square but 100mm square would be better.

12 plastic tie wraps or a long length of strong twine / string

2 pieces of wood about 1m long by 100mm deep. This can be taken from another pallet.

Heavy hammer

claw hammer

Nails or 50mm screws and a screwdriver

Cardboard

Piece of Carpet for top.

1 helper

For YOUR first basic compost bin to get you started assemble the pallets in a pile in the area that you want to put your finished compost bin.

If you have a helper get them to hold one pallet on edge.

Get a second pallet and place it corner to corner.

With your tie wraps or garden twine tie these two pallets together as a temporary measure.

continue with the third pallet and tie wrap / tie together to the second pallet. You will now have a shape that resembles two sides and a back of a square.

As this shape is now in the final position you can take one of the long pieces of 1.5m x 100mm square wood and place it in the corner made by two of your pallets. Hammer this wooden stake into the ground until the top of the stake is level with the top of your pallet.In the picture below the extra bit of post was cut square with the bin. Continue on with the next rear corner the same as the first. you can now nail or screw the pallets to these two posts that are secured in the earth.

You now come to the front of your pallets and fix one of the pieces of timber (1m x 100mm) to the top of the two pallet sides and a second piece to the bottom to keep them in shape This enables you to then hammer home the remaining two 1.5m stakes in the front corners as you have with the previous rear corners. Fix the front corners to these stakes and then remove the pieces of wood from the top and bottom of the front. The space that is open should be the size of your 4th pallet and this can be simply placed in the gap and tied in place.

You can nail the cardboard to the inside of the pallets to form a liner to stop the materials spilling out and over time this will also rot down.

You can nail a piece of carpet onto the rear pallet and this will fold up when filling the bin and then roll it back out to cover the contents

That is a basic compost bin for all your garden Rubbish. Remember not to put any cooked food or raw meats on the compost heap as this will definitely attract the rats.

Try to make sure that there is a mix of materials from the likes of grass cuttings, woody type material and carbon material. Mix torn up paper, cardboard etc with the grass clippings and this will help it all rot down without going into a slimy mush. It will not harm the compost if you turn it over every couple of months so that more air is mixed into the mix.

you can use some of the proprietary compost making liquids that you water down and add to the mix but a much more potent accelerator is male human urine. A couple of good goes into a bucket filled up to 10 litres and poured onto your heap will very soon have it burning hot.

Now that you have one compost bin made all you need to do to increase this to two bins is add on a back and one right side to the one you have already made. Hammer home 3 more stakes and fix these pallets to the stakes. This will leave an opening in the front to which you can again place a pallet and tie it in place.

If you go for the two bin version then when you are turning the compost all you need to do is turn it from one bin to the next.

A second version to the compost bin is to recycle a damaged water butt.

As you can see from the picture below this butt had been drilled, bunged, split and repaired many times and was now totally unable to hold water.

So it was turned upside down, drilled with large holes all the way around the bottom so that the worms can get into the bin and also the liquor produced can run back into the ground.....

....and then filled with compost.

I said at the top of the page that using recycled wooden pallets are the best way to go but this butt would have either laid around my garden not being used or would have gone to landfill which I abhor above all else. With that in mind it was used as a compost bin.