Question about bins made of pallets

[Wardea64]

Hi all, back here in the UK last Summer was unbelievably hot and as a gardener, in this instance working in a big garden only 4 hours a week, I was too hot and exhausted to turn the heaps over. Big mistake. These particular heaps are adjacent to trees, etc and the fibrous roots made their way through various cardboard, plastic surrounds and ended up with heaps solid with these roots. The hours since then of scraping by hand, every ounce I could get. Not funny but a good learning curve. I have now used two builders bags so we shall see if it happens again as I don’t get much time to fiddle about with these heaps.

[rainbowgardener]

My compost piles are right under a big old tree, with the compost sitting directly on the ground. So I have at times had those fibrous tree roots growing into it. I just cut them loose from the tree and leave them in the compost. Once they are no longer attached to the tree, they will die and decompose.

[thanrose]

Tree roots growing into my pile don't really bother me. I spade through them for the most part. Some trees can have thicker lateral roots that are problematic though. Live and learn, eh?

[toxcrusadr]

Usually if you have roots it means you're scooping out finished compost just because of the time involved to grow them. If they are big ones I'll shake them out and throw them back into a compost pile. The fibrous ones often get left in. It's a pain though, you can't use a fork to dig, it takes a shovel to cut them. Sometimes I cut straight down in a grid pattern all over the pile to cut them up before trying to dig into the pile.

[toxcrusadr]

You won't need to mow that much where the compost pile sits anyhow. But you can always run over the area with a magnet if you're concerned.

I built an outhouse out of pallets for my shop building in the woods. Fun and extremely durable.