My neighbors were getting rid of these pallets and I was able to snatch them up before they hit the curb for trash day. I have been toying with the idea of building/buying a compost bin since starting up a backyard garden over the past few weeks and couldn't turn down the opportunity.
More info and pictures here, https://mastodon.sdf.org/@Famicoman/110561970446094158
Hey thanks for the information! Anecdotally, how long did it take for the eggshells to break down for you (if you kept them in). I'm not planning on using any of this until next spring/summer so I'm not too worried about what will be breaking down short-term.
Either way, I'll have a massive amount of leaves coming in this fall from my property, so this will be 90% leaves when all is said and done!
After a long time, at least six months, I dug through the compost and the fragments of shells and every original piece looked the same regardless of the size, like it hadn't broken down at all. I even found some orange peels that hadn't fully broken down, which really surprised, so I started using a food processor to really grind the eggshells into powder first, but that powder is really fine, and it floats everywhere when you take off the lid and then after I mixed in the eggshell powder, that was when I got the fungal infection in the soil, and I was just like okay, and started looking up other methods and then found that talk, just went full leaf. It just seems like it takes a really long time for most trash to break down. Like some fruit peels apparently need half a year or multiple years to break down, which is crazy to me.
And I'll say I lived in Hawaii at the time, which obviously is incredibly humid and damp all the time, and these eggshells and orange peels were there all year. I could feel the heat of the compost pile, so matter was decomposing, but there are just a lot of food materials that don't break down as fast as I assumed they would at the time.
Like banana peels! I don't think I ever saw a banana peel break down. They were just there every time I looked through the pile, arrogantly enduring next to the egg shells and the orange peels.