Though I am known to enthuse from time to time about a useful or well-designed garden tool, rare would be my application of the word “revolutionary” to any garden utensil. It would require both an unlikely synthesis of simplicity and functionality with the potential to mentally reconfigure an otherwise tedious garden labor. There might even have to be beauty and enjoyment of use thrown in as well to merit the “R” word. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I’m dusting off the word revolutionary because I have recently found such a tool!
The Compost Crank and Compost Crank Twist by Lotech Products. You won’t ever be cranky again about turning the compost, I promise! Photo courtesy of Lotech Products, Inc.
The tool is called the Compost Crank aerator, and it’s a composter’s dream. The thing is simplicity itself: an offset, stainless steel rod with two free-rotating hand grips , ending in a corkscrew with a slight bevel at the very tip. Its form reminds me of the brace-and-bit hand drill of old that my father had in our cellar workshop.
The offset handles spin the rod (very easily, I might add) and that sends the tip burrowing down into your compost. With a gentle or a mighty tug, depending on how deep one has burrowed, the bottom material comes up while the new, fresh compostables at the top find their way down, an action not dissimilar to the movement of laundry along the corkscrew core of a washing machine (a top-loader, that is). Driving deep into the heart of a large compost pile, I find it can actually be pretty hard to pull the tool out, so I tend to work a larger pile by a succession of smaller dives and pulls, creating a column of loose, fluffy material that offers little resistance to successively deeper dives.
The Compost Crank totally eliminates the need for a three-bin system and destroys the assumption that the compost needs to be “turned,” as in “flung somewhere”. I actually use a 55-gallon trash can and a number of plastic bins for indoor composting with this system. The material to be composted (old potting soil in one system, kitchen scraps mixed with pine shavings in another) stays right in place from start to finish, not moving laterally into another bin but only vertically within the same or area. Wherever the crank’s beveled end finds it way, it brings oxygen behind it, madly burrowing like some implacable, stainless-steel worm, and the tool’s pigtail curlicue forms a kind of basket which lifts a whole section of compost with every pull, allowing the pile a substantial gulp of oxygen-rich air. With the Compost Crank, stationary composting becomes a fast and odorless process.
I’m even using it indoors with drainless containers to compost potting soil. Normally a container without drain holes would be anathema to the aerobic composter because of the water (and stink) that builds up at the bottom, but if you can constantly keep that benthic compost circulating to the top, then the extra water will keep the entire pile moist. Sure, you might want to add a spigot on the bottom should there be an overabundance of moisture that needs periodic siphoning off, but my point is that you can compost aerobically under conditions which would have been limiting in the past such as indoors in containers.
One tip for using this remarkable tool: allow a certain amount of free space at the top of your container to allow the material being pulled up a place to land. You are, after all, fluffing the compost and thus increasing its volume. If you fill your compost container to the brim, then when you pull compost up after cranking down, a combination of whatever you added to the top and whatever is coming up from below will be displaced and cascade all around the container, clearly not a desirable result, especially if indoors. I like about 6″ of head space from the surface of the compost to the edge of the container to capture the messiness that inevitably occurs with each crank and pull.
The Compost Crank’s slightness of appearance belies its utter power. This is one of those revolutionary tools which will thoroughly reform your notion of compost. Have a look at the product, including a video of it in use, below. Then join me in the compost revolution!
https://www.lotechproducts.com/compost-aerators/the-compost-crank/