Trommel compost sifter a great new addition to the garden tools.

Post date: Oct 21, 2012 7:35:52 PM

The Trommel Compost Sifter Build Workshop, brought to us by our good friends at Queens Botanical Gardens and NYC Compost Project was a great success, especially since the weather was amazing.

We met some new people from the neighbourhood, and got a trommel sifter into the bargain.

The build was relatively straight-forward, first we made a frame, and added castors.

The sifter part is made from hardware cloth and old bicycle rims, donated to NYC Project by Recycle-a-bicycle, which has a workshop in LIC (repurposing old bicycles would make a great winter activity, don't you think!)

After something of a wheel alignment, and a little trial and error, we had ourselves a trommel sifter:

and in the blink of an eye, we had ourselves a giant pile of sifted finished compost:

Ok, so its a medium sized pile.

The new trommel sifter makes amazingly short work of the job of sifting, which we were doing in an old milk crate, which was back-breakingly hard labour.

Thanks to Gina and JC for coming and showing us what to do, and to NYC Compost Project for donating the materials and the expertise to the garden.

Building the sifter was so much fun, I am really looking forward to attending the Master Composter Course in March out at the NYC Compost Project facility at Queens Botanical Garden.

It is once again time to construct a hot pile for all of the collected kitchen and garden scraps in advance of the colder weather in winter, which will be taking place this coming Saturday the 27th of October at 11am. We will also be setting up for the leaf collection for Project Leaf Drop which kicks off the following weekend. Please feel free to come and give us a hand, but remember your old clothes, gloves and old shoes.