Garden Gourmet Composter - Is the Garden Gourmet a Good Composter?

The Garden Gourmet Composter is a best seller. It’s a relatively simple low cost compost bin. But is the Garden Gourmet a good composter for you? Here we take a look at the best uses of the Garden Gourmet compost bin.

The Garden Gourmet was featured on the Oprah Winfrey show, so it’s gotten a lot of press. It’s actually manufactured by Scepter Corporation and licensed for distribution in the US by the name Garden Gourmet. There are many other compost bins that are offered for sale that appear quite similar. They have been shipping for years, so there’s a good deal of real world experience that says they will last for many years.

All these units tout the fact that they are made from mostly post consumer recycled plastics. It’s and average sized composter, about 2 feet on each side, and about 3 feet tall. The 11 cubic foot capacity is a good size for the average gardener.

It has a slot on the bottom that allows the finished compost to be removed, and a door on the top to add material. The roof is slanted to keep rain from puddling, and the sides are vented to allow needed ventilation of the bin. It assembles with no tools, but it doesn’t have a bottom floor, just sitting on the ground. If you expect problems with rodents, you may want to set it on a screen or some other barrier to keep visitors from getting to you kitchen waste. Take car to set it up on level ground, the parts fit together much better if you do so.

The attractive feature of any compost bin that has a door on the bottom is that you simply add material at the top, it “cooks” for a while, and the finished compost appears at the bottom, where you scoop it out. And, if you don’t have a lot of garden or kitchen waste, that can work fine. The problem is that it can take months for the compost to finish if you aren’t turning it every week or more.



If you do decide to turn it using a Compost Crank (this is clearly the best compost turning tool), then the problem becomes that you are working in fresh material at the same time you are trying to finish off the compost that is being turned. In reality, if you decide to accelerate any bin or tumbler by working, turning, rotating, etc. then you need a place to queue up the fresh material like another pile or bin. That’s not to say that’s a problem, and the great thing is you will be able to get much more compost from an actively turned pile than one that just sits for months.

The decision as to which approach you use is most likely based on how much material you have to compost. If you have a lot, plan for trying to accelerate, if not, then no reason to put that much effort into the bin, just dump it in and empty it once every few months.

If you decide to purchase this or any composter, be sure to check the prices including shipping. The shipping costs on composters vary from free to $35 or more, and if you buy from Amazon they typically aren’t part of their Prime shipping plan.