Hi, we recently had our composter delivered. The city organised an action to promote composting and were giving 500 composters to households. We were one of those that applied. Lucky! 🙂

There was a one problem – ALL of our garden is in concrete. We bought the house in 2014 and are just finishing with the inside refurbishing. But the garden is still to have its round of improvements. Since we are now obliged to compost, we decided to put the composter anyway. We surfed the web a bit and found the  way to make it work with composter on concrete. Since the instructions were scarce, I decided to write this post with images showing how we did it.

1. Find a place for composter and prepare the surface.
   We found a place below the stairs that lead to the upper patio. The composter barely fits in there, but if it fits…. So we made the one brick raised bed approximately the size of the composter.
2. Drill the hole in concrete if possible – optional.
   My hubby then decided to drill the hole in the concrete so that the space inside the composter is connected to the earth below. But in our case below the concrete is layer of sand, so i don’t know if the occupants will use that space. This is completely optional.
3. Put the soil inside the prepared raised bed.
   Luckily we have a bit of grassy area outside the garden that we are currently trying to turn into flower beds. So we used the extra soil from there. If you don’t have that luxury, you can buy plant soil in the store.
4. Add the occupants – optional
   During the soil digging i unearthed some worms that we put into the dirt. The organisms are crucial in order to get the best compost.
5. Add the composter
   We had to remove one side then attach it after setting it in place.
6. Add some bought compost
   This is in case you didn’t use the bought stuff in the step 3. With the compost you add the beneficial bacteries.
7. Put the “brown parts”
   “Brown parts” are branches (which we don’t have), paper (used here), egg shells. We used paper/cardboard casing that holds the eggs. just shred it to smaller bits in order for it to be more easily digested by our guest worms and bacteria.If using cardboard it is a good idea to wet it.
8. Put the “green parts”
   “Green parts” are the veggies, grass, fruits, but NOTHING cooked. Also please make sure that you don’t put anything that is poisonous, or aggressive weeds (like couch grass).
9. Continue building your compost heap
   Make sure you build your heap so you add the same parts of brown and green

Conclusion

This is how we built our composter on concrete. The part with drilling the concrete is optional. We could do it because our concrete is old and we didn’t care about it. But since below it is sand with parts of bricks i don’t think we gained much from it. If you aren’t able to drill the concrete then just pile up the solid. You can even make a two brick high raised bed. The choice is yours.  If you have the space, you can make the wall of the raised bed bigger then the composter, so that composter fits inside the raised bed. I’ll put updates on how the compost is going.

Cheers 🙂