We all love a good compost. It is an essential aspect to any garden. But with the the busyness of summer, compost piles at shared, community gardens can often be the last thing everyone thinks about. They need the right recipe, and consistent turning, watering, and monitoring. As a result, they often don't get the maintenance they need to turn into a usable compost. 

The Common Orchard Project, in partnership with the City of Cincinnati’s Office of Environment & Sustainability and Queen City Commons, is working to help gardens generate quality compost on-site without the need for ongoing maintenance. Our composting work with garden and community sites around Cincinnati has been inspired by the Johnson-Su Bioreactors built at the Walnut Hills Community Gardens. Johnson-Su bioreactors are a no-turn, aerated composting system that can produce up to one cubic yard of compost in a year. Over the last three years, our Compost Coordinator, Marie, has filled countless bioreactors with Gary Dangel and the Walnut Hills gardens, fine tuning the efficiencies and qualities of the system. 

This spring, we've taken this system to other community and public gardens. We have iterated on this original bioreactor design to build and fill bioreactors that work with the needs and limitations of gardens. Through this model, we support gardens with supplies, materials (including food scraps collected by Queen City Commons), and implementation, to compost up to a ton of material all at once. This system requires no ongoing maintenance and yields up to a yard of quality compost in a year's time - all for the garden to use. 

To see photos of the system in action, check out our website at https://www.commonorchard.com/compost.