compost tools

which one do you need?

These three answer the three questions that actually come up once you have decided to compost. There is nothing to install and no account to create — open a page, put your own numbers in, and the answer updates as you go. We do not ask who you are and we do not keep what you enter, so nothing carries over to your next visit; what the site itself records is set out on the privacy page.

Start with the bin size calculator if you do not have a system yet. Container size is the decision that is expensive to get wrong, because it is the one you have to buy. It asks four questions — household size, how much yard waste you generate, what space you actually have, and what you care about most — and returns a specific system with a volume, from a continuous-flow worm bin for an apartment to a three-bay setup for a large yard with heavy leaf fall. The important thing it encodes is that space and priorities override volume: no outdoor space means vermicomposting regardless of how much you produce.

Use the browns & greens calculator once the bin exists and something is going wrong. Nearly every home composting complaint — it smells of ammonia, it is slimy, it has done nothing in four months — is a carbon-to-nitrogen problem. Build your actual mix by parts and the live gauge shows where it lands against the 25–30:1 target, then names a specific fix ("add two parts dry leaves") rather than telling you to add more browns and leaving you to guess how many. It uses the published C:N values from Cornell and NRAES-54, the same numbers on our item pages.

Print the cheat sheet for everyone else in the house. Most composting failures are not technique failures; they are somebody putting the wrong thing in the caddy because they did not know. One page on the fridge prevents more problems than either calculator.

For a single item, the fastest route is the A–Z index or the category browser. If you want to know how the verdicts are decided before you trust them, that is the methodology page.