It’s been a few weeks since my last NatureMill update. The main reason for this is that I’ve had little positive to report.
Since restarting the machine in February after our holidays I’ve not been able to get it working ‘as advertised’.
There are 2 issues, the main one being the smell. While most of the time the machine does not smell, boy does it pong when you put something in. The other problem is condensation which results in wet compost and gets into the air filter, which possibly contributes to making the smell worse.
I’ve contacted the NatureMill guys in the USA for guidance on several occasions, but the response is much same each time “Add more sawdust and baking soda”. Just to be sure I’ve reset the machine, started the ‘cultures’ from fresh with soil from the garden and left it to settle for a week with out adding food.
According to the instructions you need to add 2 tablespoons of baking soda and a couple of hand fulls of sawdust at the start of each compost batch. I’m adding sawdust and baking soda pretty much every other time we add waste. As there are just 2 of us we don’t produce much, adding mostly bread, some peelings or veg that’s gone over in the fridge. With light use compared to a family the extra sawdust and soda seems a little excessive, and worse seems to make no difference.
We have produced a few batches of compost, but it looks nothing like the compost in the NatureMill video. It’s wet and I’d be loathed to put my hands in it. I’ve been adding it to my garden compost bins to kick start the grass clippings but it’s too early to say if it helps.
All in all at $300 the NatureMill has been disappointing. I’ll carry on using it, as the smell is not too much of a problem in our Veranda (and I can’t very well ship it back to the states) but I could not recommend having one in a kitchen or small apartment. In our experience the pong will be too much !
Before the NatureMill arrived we used a low-tech solution, a mini bin from Ikea. The lid seems airtight, there were no smells, and it held our green waste until the weekend when I added it to the garden compost bin. Best of all it offers a saving of $290 over a NatureMill 😉
Lot’s of cooked food waste ? Buy Chickens ?
Thanks for posting your experiences with your composter. I just bought the same one a few weeks ago, and its still mixing compost. I agree with the smell, its really bad every time you open it, it smells like vomit. We’re going to try to plug in an air freshner and see if that helps. If not, we may have to move it somewhere, as I don’t want to have to keep adding the baking soda all the time. Keep posting your experience with it, and also if you see how its helped your garden.
Thanks for your comment – My first ‘real’ one I think !
I’ve started to experiment with different types of “saw dust” and have just done a batch with some wood chippings that were produced from some pruning we had done in the Winter. The result is encouraging as the small is more acceptable then the pet bedding sawdust that I had been using. Full post to follow.