Rebuilding YOLO Compost Tumblers business

I started the YOLO Compost Tumbler business in early 2017 with Celliers' superb design of the compost tumbler unit and my passion/obsession for recycling / waste reduction. At this time, we needed a composting solution for our home and while Googling concepts for compost heaps, Celliers stumbled across compost tumblers. They made so much sense. We ran with it.

YOLO has never been a big business as it has often struggled with product supply challenges from the factory. This makes it really difficult to market and promote a product when you do not have anything on the shelf to supply to customers. Nonetheless, YOLO has a niche, loyal following and scope for expansion.

YOLO was also severely compromised by last year's factory closure. When I got my assets back, I moved the moulds to a moulder here in George. Through summer, they struggled with loadshedding and keeping up with their existing orders and were not able to get to even test moulding my YOLOs. I moved the moulds in February to another moulder in Cape Town who had more capacity. 

In late March, I travelled through to Cape Town to approve the moulding and assembly of the test units. They were perfect. These were the first units moulded since May/June last year! The first moulded and completed products started going out to waiting orders four weeks ago.

I have a lot of work to do to get YOLO properly up and running and out there again. The first step is having stock on hand - I do have some stock now with the moulders. And then getting word out there more. This means making videos and sharing content more regularly.

I've met with a marketing guy (a YOLO customer who loves his YOLOs and sees much scope for expansion) but have yet to secure his services until I get my stock flow sorted. I look forward to hearing his ideas. Good to have an outside perspective.

YOLO is quieter over winter so I have some a bit of time to prepare and look at a push for spring and summer.

Factory sale success

 I've got a factory sale on my YOLO Compost Tumblers at the moment. I created a Facebook advert for this and put it out there. 

I've found Facebook ads to be a hit-and-miss. The last one I did got many likes from dummy profiles and people completely outside of my target market. I once addressed this to Facebook - and got a response. The customer care person suggested that my ad was perhaps recruiting new customers. Hard to describe to someone outside of South Africa how I know my market and how I know when I look at the profiles of people that these people don't really exist. I left it.

This ad seems to have hit the mark with better-than-expected uptake.

The factory sale is well timed as autumn and winter are great season to get into composting. Lawn cuttings are at a low (less volume to deal with when you're starting out on a composting journey) and carbon-rich dry leaves are abundant - a key source of dry materials to 'balance' out moisture-rich kitchen peelings.

Over the past year or so, the factory has collected a bunch of tumbler shells that have blemishes of some or other kind. These are usually the same colour as the plastic and range from pre-heating marks to porosity, smudged logos or overcooking discolouration (darker than normal) inside. Blemishes have no effect on the structure and longevity of the shell. Purely aesthetic, like a scar or pimple on you. The factory passes on a good discount to me to move the units, which take up space, and to get back some of their spend on material, gas, and labour.

The factory sale has gone well with all but three units (one small, two medium) gone. This has been a good exercise to go through.

Building a garden for The Joburg International Flower Show

During this past week, I was involved with building a garden for The Johannesburg International Flower Show, a new event created to be South Africa's equivalent of the 'Chelsea Flower Show'. I teamed up with landscaper Danielle Day - The Garden Girl. We'd met last year through YOLO. I love her work and ours has been a great partnership.

Dan created our design for a kitchen courtyard garden - it is charming. What I love most about it is that you'll look at our garden and think, "This is awesome, I can do something like this in my courtyard / small garden space". And you can!

Dan had a clear plan for the week starting with the layout of the site on Monday and brick laying of the pathway and perimeter to installing our wall and washing line, the planting boxes, and then the planting and finishing touches.

What was really exciting is that we use my pre-production YOLO Concrete Mixer to mix the concrete to plant poles. The one challenge we'll have in the marketing of this unit is really around behaviour change. If you've mixed concrete in a wheelbarrow for 15 years, it will take a bit to change to using something that is neater, cleaner and more convenient purely because it is different.

Using the pre-production YOLO Concrete Mixer for stand building. We emptied a 40kg concrete premix bag into the YOLO and added water. The tap was downhill - about 15m from our stand. We rolled the YOLO up to where we needed it and poured the concrete into the holes for the poles. Job done.

Compost delivery - kindly sponsored for our show garden by Stanler Farms. This compost is so rich.

Paved walkway. We used bark chips in the gaps and for the rest of our flooring.

Composting plays a big role in any garden to improve soil quality and provide nutrients to plants. The theme of our garden is "From table to garden" because all of the organic materials that come out of your kitchen as a result of meal preparation can go straight into a YOLO Compost Tumbler to create compost that can go into your garden. Less trash going out of your home and more goodness going into your soil.

We've incorporated a medium-sized YOLO Compost Tumbler in our kitchen courtyard garden.  Organic material from your kitchen and home, like fruit and vegetable peeling, egg shells, egg trays, tea bags, and coffee grounds can go straight into your YOLO. And the compost, can go straight back into your garden.

Danielle has cleverly planned our four planting boxes with plants for Health & Immunity, Digestion, Skin and Mental Health. Take a look at the plants, see what you can identify. Which colour corresponds to each health theme? Elands Nursery kindly provided the strong and healthy plants that decorate our stand.

We've got garden judging on Monday afternoon and the show starts on Wednesday through to Sunday. It should be an interesting adventure this week.

JHB International Flower Show collaboration with The Garden Girl

The new Johannesburg International Flower Show (30 Oct - 3 Nov 2019 at Waterfall City) has been on my radar for a few weeks after a YOLO Compost Tumbler customer, whose company is involved with the event, contacted me saying that it would be a great to exhibit YOLO (she loves hers).

After five days of exhibiting at Decorex two weeks ago, things have moved along very speedily and I'm really excited about the direction that things are going.

Last year I met 'The Garden Girl', a Joburg-based landscaper, when my pink-and-grey YOLO Compost Tumblers caught her attention. Her company colours are pink and grey. Danielle (aka 'Dan') does a lot of residential work and my compost tumblers fit in perfectly - she has installed a couple of tumblers for her clients. From the get go, we connected.

I follow Dan's 'The Garden Girl' Facebook page and just love her before-and-after photographs. What I appreciate most is how she uses clean lines, simple upgrades, existing materials and clever use of practical plants and flowers to create a garden that is pleasing - a space that can be used and enjoyed.

She recently assisted a client with a small project where the client sent Dan a photo or the space they wanted to improve, and Dan sent back a 3D rendering and instructions on what plants to use and how to create the improvement. I just loved it!

When I moved to Parys, I totally revamped my front 'garden' by creating a geometric pattern with 'quadrants' using gumpoles - there are two identical shapes on either side of the walkway. The big oak trees on the pavement creates dense shade throughout the summer and so plants don't do very well here. I'm not big into watering or maintenance, which doesn't help either. I've got existing plants and newly planted plants... all in all it is not what I envisaged and it looks scruffy when I wanted neat-and-tidy.

I emailed Dan before I went to Decorex to say, "I need your help please".

At Decorex, I met a lady from the Johannesburg International Flower Show (a different one to the lady that I'd been in contact with). Shelley had made a bee-line for our stand announcing, "You just have to have YOLO at the flower show!". She didn't yet know that I'd already had comms with the event; she specifically handles gardens and outdoors exhibits. Shelley suggested that I incorporate the compost tumblers into a garden display, which is something totally beyond my frame of reference. I got back from Decorex and called Dan.

The wheels turned quickly and the next day (last week only!) Dan met with Shelley to get the specs and rundown, during last week we whatsapp'd inspirational images to each other, and today Dan came through to Parys.

Hanging with Dan the Garden Girl.

Our theme is 'Kitchen Courtyard Garden' and Dan has really come up with lovely design for a garden that even I would be able to manage!

She will rope her mom and dad into creating some of the bits that we'll need; I'll rope in my mom, Celliers and our factory to create others. Dan has things and I have things that we will incorporate and then there will be other items that we will need to borrow and source for the show. She is definitely the brains and skills behind this design and the implementation. I'll be a good assistant.

Tickets for the show are already on sale. This show is destined to become an annual feature event - to be South Africa's own 'Chelsea Flower Show'. Considering how well South African landscapers, designers and gardeners have done abroad, we will be in for a treat on home soil. There will be gardens to see, plant, flower- and garden-related items to purchase, live music to listen to, and workshops to attend. The Johannesburg Flower Show website is johannesburgflowershow.co.za

I have never been involved in anything like this before so it will be an exciting journey. We have two months to get the pieces together to create magic.

Measuring our YOLO Compost Tumbler's social impact

Last week I submitted an application for Chivas Regal's 'The Venture' business awards. "We're looking for innovative start-ups that use business to solve global social or environmental challenges," their website stated.

"The Chivas Venture is a global search to find and support the most promising start-ups with the potential to succeed financially and make a positive impact on the lives of others. One social entrepreneur from each participating country will make it to the global final and have a chance to win a share of $1 million in funding."

It took me four hours to complete the application and in the process I wrote almost 3,000 words. One of the questions asked about the social impact of our product and asked for figures, if possible. As I had no idea how to measure the social impact of our compost tumblers, I turned to Google. A response in one of the dozen pieces I looked through suggested looking at my customers and assessing where they were before the intervention and what changed afterwards.

 Our YOLO Compost Tumbler solves a problem for our customers: what to do with their organic waste. Many people in apartments, townhouses, estates and retirement complexes cannot have compost heaps (due to space or rule restrictions). Those on properties with sufficient space deal with other issues like pests (rodents, snakes, monkeys, dogs), complexity of heap management and lack of interest that prevents them from composting their organic waste.

Before my customers bought their YOLO Compost Tumblers, their organic waste (kitchen and garden) went out on the street for collection by their municipality on trash day. These bags of organic waste would then end up at landfill sites where they rot anaerobically, under tons of garbage, to give off methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

 After my customers receive their YOLO Compost Tumbler, their organic waste goes into the tumbler - instead of the trash. The contents get regularly mixed and aerated, and around three months after emptying their first tub of kitchen cuttings into  the first shell, my customers are able to dig a shell of nutrient-rich compost into their gardens, gift to a friend or donate to a community gardening project. That they get nutrient-rich compost out is very much a positive byproduct of YOLO's problem-solving function.

As the YOLO Compost Tumbler has two shells, one will be active and the other maturing so after the first shell has been filled, the customer enters a cycle where every six to eight weeks they're emptying a shell of matured compost.

 How can we allocate numbers to this process?

 Consider 100 YOLO Compost Tumblers. Assuming that between our users of small, medium and large units, they may average one black bag of organic waste (kitchen & garden) per week during the year (more waste in summer, less in winter). For each customer, that equates to 52 black bags a year that would have been put on the street for municipal collection.

For 100 customers, this is 5,200 bags in a one-year period. Accounting for only 100 units, we can already see the social impact and potential for incredible growth with every YOLO Compost Tumbler that finds a happy home.

 This is also about more than the actual organic waste materials. This is about the 5,200 less garbage bags that have to be picked up by municipal workers. This is about the 5,200 less bags of waste that are dumped at landfill sites. This is also about the 5,200 black plastic bags will no longer be used once-off and discarded.

 In addition, every other form of waste recycling has a long chain of interactions that have to happen. Plastics, for example, can be separated at home and put out for informal recycling collectors to pick up or these can be dropped at a recycling bin or centre. At the recycling centre, plastics are further separated. They're compacted and transported to a facility that can turn the waste plastic into plastic pellets - or the like - that another company can purchase to manufacture products from the recycled material.

With a YOLO and your own organic waste, no further intervention is necessary. Neither collectors, transporters, nor manufacturers. Kitchen cuttings and garden material decompose inside the YOLO shell and a product results - mature compost. This can be dug directly into the garden to put valuable nutrients back into the soil for our vegetables, flowers and other plants to absorb.

This is the measurable social impact of our YOLO Compost Tumblers. And we're only just beginning.

Learning about retail

YOLO is a big learning curve for me. A lot of what I have been doing comes from 'educated' gut instinct and it was good to have some of this verified.

Setting prices for products is difficult. We know our production costs and also need to make something on each item to cover salaries, marketing and other business expenses. But pricing isn't as simple as 1 + 1 = 2 because the price has to be one that the market will be prepared to pay for the product. For us, this means compromising to give our customers the most reasonable deal.

Our YOLO Compost Tumbler was very kindly 'hosted' by a gardening place for a few weeks to gauge interest from the public. Despite August and September being our busiest months to date, I didn't receive a single order through them. As I had to be out their way on Thursday, I dropped them a quick note to say I'd be through and that I'd collect my tumblers. I also thanked them for being so willing to put my compost tumblers on display and that I hoped in time, as our brand builds, that there will be more demand from the public for our product to be in their store.

The guy replied to say they'd had lots of interest but that the price had put people off. As I believed that my YOLOs were priced there at my recommended price, I'd been thinking that what was missing was the one-on-one interactions that we've enjoyed at expos and which the compost tumblers would have missed at his place.

It was only after I collected the tumblers that I saw the price tags...

We sell the small double at R2,295.00. Their price: R3,469.95.
We sell the medium double at R2,995.00. Their price: R4,159.95.

No wonder!

Unfortunately hundreds of potential customers may have been put off ever considering a YOLO Compost Tumbler but there is also a silver lining in that now have confirmation of what the market is not prepared to pay. I wouldn't either!

If people are not composting already, by any means, our YOLO Compost Tumbler is the best solution for them - apartments, townhouses and homes with gardens. But, starting to recycle organic waste from your kitchen and garden doesn't happen overnight. This is a 'behaviour change' process and it comes with a price tag, unless you have space in your yard for a compost heap in which to dump organic material. Whether a person decides to go with a YOLO Compost Tumbler, bokashi system, hot bin or wormery, it costs to buy something to help you turn organic waste into nutrient-rich compost.

We're still in the first few months of our business and while we have a long way to go, we're doing things right by considering the customer first. 

Want to know what our most popular YOLO Compost Tumbler colour combinations are? From the beginning, green-yellow has been a favourite combo. We introduced our brown and grey colours in late August and have seen a rise in the popularity of green-brown. Green-orange is a favourite in the medium and large sizes while brown-grey is also currently trend in these sizes. The orange-yellow combo comes in waves. We have made a number of units in 'outlying' combinations like grey with green, orange or yellow; these look amazing too.

An experience at Decorex

The past two weeks have been full and energising. I spent last week in Jo'burg for the Decorex show, a home and design expo held at Gallagher Convention Centre. My mom came along to help on the stand. I'm so glad that she did because we were non-stop busy with visitors. She has her own YOLO Compost Tumbler so she knows how it works and by the end of the week she was a composting demonstration pro.

Me and Liz in our expo outfits - complete with gardening wellies.

We were located in Hall 4 - Outdoor Lifestyle, which suited us perfectly.

Over the five days of the expo we spoke to hundreds of people and demonstrated how to use our compost tumblers. We had all three of our sizes on the stand - small (left), medium (top right) and large (bottom right). We pulled the large out of the oven on the Monday night, just in time to take it to the show for setup the next morning! We're still busy with R&D on this unit to finalise the amount of plastic needed, the frame and other bits. It will be ready in a few weeks.

A photo wall with photos of our YOLO Compost Tumblers sent to us from customers.

Expo days are long and tiring but the experience was totally worth it. We had some on-the-day sales and have had other post-expo. I think these will trickle in steadily over the next few months. Many people that we met were about to move or in the process of building new homes.

For us the big benefit of the expo was in meeting and talking to people. We were astounded by how many people are separating their trash, recycling and trying to reduce the waste that comes into and out of their homes. In dealing with organic waste, our YOLO Compost Tumbler is an excellent solution, especially where you just don't have space for a heap or if you're just looking for a way to compost kitchen waste - like in an apartment (no garden) or townhouse (tiny to no garden).

Many people that we met are composting - to some degree. They're trying wormeries, bokashi, hot bins and the like. This is great because it shows that more and more people are giving value to composting as a means to deal with organic waste and they give value to the compost itself.

I've felt so despondent recently around waste and recycling. If there is one thing that is a big problem in my home town of Parys, it is litter. It really is a serious problem. In the week before Decorex, I was at Pick 'n Pay, packing my groceries into my reusable shopping bags. I looked down the row of checkouts and saw that I was the only person there not using - and buying every time - PNP's plastic shopping bags! (no, they didn't pull old bags out of their handbags to reuse, these were crisp and new)

Coming back from Decorex I'm far more optimistic that there is change happening. 

Nice way to see the size difference between the medium (2 x 100 litre shells) and large (2 x 200 litre shells).

As a result of being at Decorex, we have added two new colours to our range - grey and earth. We met a number of people in complexes and estates where they are restricted from having brightly-coloured items that do not go with the colour scheme of the place. Our new colours go well with each other and they also pair beautifully with our existing green, orange and yellow colours. I fetched plastic from our supplier on Thursday and we'll be moulding the first of the new colour units on Monday.

We also learned a bunch of other things from the visitors to our stand:

• Many are not composting but they want to. They're currently tossing all of their kitchen waste and garden waste out with the trash. They want to do better.
• People think that compost smells. A healthy compost should smell earthy. Good health is achieved by adding a mix of wet and dry materials and regular tumbling.
• Different areas of Jo'burg have rat problems. The rats go for compost heaps and so people have stopped composting as a way to prevent rats coming to their gardens. Our YOLO Compost Tumbler is a closed unit with a lockable latch. Rats, mice, monkeys and dogs can't get into it.

A jar of 8-week old, unfinished compost from my small YOLO Compost Tumbler at home. The jar started off almost full and by the end of the expo it has reduced in volume by half - natural composting process. These jars of compost were really useful to show people what unfinished compost looks like, why it needs to mature (for the last-added contents to compost and catch up to the first-added contents) and for them to smell the mix ("not bad", "earthy", "amazing" were some comments).

A jar of finished compost from my YOLO Compost Tumbler at home. This mix is just kitchen waste with egg shells, torn up egg trays and dry leaves to balance the wet materials from the kitchen. Again people were amazed that it doesn't smell. Friends, compost shouldn't smell bad. The only time it smells bad is if it is too wet and it doesn't have enough oxygen. It's the anaerobic decomposition that makes it smell nasty. This tumbler shell that I emptied (and put some into a jar) was my 5th shell emptied since mid January, when I was using a prototype tumbler. I weighted the contents of the shell when I emptied it - 7.5kg! And mostly just kitchen waste that had composted. Amazing!

We're quite certain that 10 years ago - and even five years ago - our YOLO Compost Tumbler would be a harder sell. Times have changed and people are becoming more conscious and aware of the state of the environment and that we have to do our bit in our homes. Our timing is just right.

When you hear reports that there will be more plastic in our oceans than fish by 2050, scientists are not being alarmist. Just looking around me at the litter in my town, this statement is hardly surprising.

Over the past 18 months, since I moved to Parys, I've been making small changes to our household to reduce the waste coming into our home and what we put out on garbage day.

The most significant changes include filling up glass bottles with milk instead of buying two-litre plastic containers, composting all of our kitchen and garden waste and, recently, taking my own fabric bags to the store to buy loose items like bananas, ginger, garlic and rolls. As a result, we've downsized our trash bin twice and are now down to a waste paper bin for our weekly household trash. I'm sure we can do better too.

The road with our new company is still long. This experience at Decorex was immensely valuable for speaking to people and making new contacts. There are a number of exciting opportunities to come.

Compost progression after nine weeks

Although I've only recently let you in on my composting adventure, I've had a growing composting obsession for the past two months. I toss stuff into my YOLO Compost Tumbler, I tumble it, I stare at it and I marvel at the organisms that are doing their thing to reduce organic matter to brown, earthy compost. You just don't get to do as much looking when the composting action is happening deep within a heap.

On Sunday, I spent some time with my compost. After nine weeks, my YOLO is less than half full. The volume goes up and down as I add material and then it starts to decompose and the organisms work on it and so the level drops. I'd say I have less than 20 litres of the 45-litre volume. I emptied it out into our wheelbarrow.

To give you an idea of what is in here...

• nine weeks of onion skins - I use an onion or two almost every night (say an average of one a day for nine weeks - that's skin and bits from 63 onions)
• lots of crushed egg shells - from what must certainly be over 120 eggs
• cardboard from at least six 30-egg egg trays
• rind from a large watermelon
• rind from a sweet melon
• lots of peelings from butternuts and other pumpkins (at least 7 to 10 of them)
• gem squash skins (cooked) - a good number of them
• lots of banana peels (my household eats bananas 1 to 3 of them a day)
• off cuts from celery, tomatoes, carrots, baby marrows, potatoes, apple cores and other bits
• rooibos tea leaves (lots!)
• a few tea bags (I'm still testing out the composting of tea bags - so far no evidence remains of the bags that I can see; I'm throwing in a bunch tomorrow)
• some coffee grinds (the rest go to my worm bin - the worms are boring compared to my YOLO)
• at least a 1/4 tumbler volume (not compacted) of dry leaves from autumn last year
• two vacuum-bag contents

This is what I have tossed into my YOLO. My family has probably added some other stuff.

For weeks I've been reading websites about composting. Compost tumblers are definitely faster due to better aeration (from the tumbling), heat (closed container) and that new material is mixed in with old. It's more efficient. But I don't believe websites that report that you'll get compost in two weeks (yes, some do). It will actually take weeks to fill, especially if you're only using kitchen scraps. And then once it is full, you stop adding new material and then leave it to mature. That takes a few weeks more. Looking at the state of my compost as it stands now, 6-8 weeks to maturity would be fair. 

Of course rate of composting depends on environmental conditions (sunny South Africa or sub-zero Alaska) and what you've put in your tumbler. I'm torn between wanting to leave my compost to mature and an interest to see just how long it will take me to get my YOLO to the point of being almost full.

I've got a tub of new material - banana skins, mielie cobs and full tea bags - to throw in tomorrow. I'm interest to see what happens to the cobs.

Between recycling plastic, paper, glass, tins and my compost, we have less than a plastic shopping bag of trash each week for a household of four.

My new YOLO products

The past few months I've been kept quite busy developing a new product - the YOLO Compost Tumbler.

Although my vegetable gardening efforts have been very poor for the past three years, I've become even more obsessive about recycling. The four bins in our kitchen are appropriately labelled (trash, plastics, paper, glass & cans) so that even guests know where to put their waste.

The only recycling element that I've had a problem with is compost. Outside our kitchen I've got an old rubbish bin, into which we tossed veggie cuttings while we were trying to figure out what to do with creating an effective compost pile.

Out back in the yard, tucked behind the outbuilding, are two compost piles. The first is a stash of leaves from last autumn that I didn't want to put out with the trash (and I was forming composting ideas) and the second is a heap on to which we pile our odd plant trimmings and grass cuttings each week.

Late last year we were trawling the web looking for compost ideas. Should we construct something smart for our compost pile with a removable tray underneath to be able to extract compost without needing to dig up the whole heap? While searching, we stumbled across compost tumblers. It immediately caught Celliers' eye as something we could make, especially as they are not readily available in South Africa. As a bonus, we could get compost out of it within a few weeks of leaving the contents to mature; unlike our heap, which we never turn, and which takes a year or more to produce useable compost.

Now, many months later, I've got the first production compost tumblers in hand under my new company name of YOLO Colours.

Celliers is the brains behind the design and manufacturing. This first one is a 45-litre shell and it comes in three colours and as a single or double unit. The focus for this unit is primarily on apartments and townhouses and homes with small gardens.

For me, composting is not really about making compost to use in your garden; it is about dealing with organic waste and reducing what I send to landfill. I just can't bring myself to put an apple core, potato peel or butternut skin in the trash.

The relatively small 45-litre volume is deceiving and while you may think you would fill it in few weeks, you won't (unless you add a lot of garden clippings, which is not the primary purpose of this 45l size). The level rises when you add new material and drops within a few days as it decomposes.

I have a pre-production test unit at home that I've been using for NINE WEEKS and it is less than half full. At one stage it was up to about 3/4 after adding leaves that I'd saved from last year. It dropped within a few days as the material began to decompose.

How does it work? It is really simple. I have a tub in my kitchen into which I put my veggie cuttings and the like. Every two or three days - depending on how much there is - I toss it into my tumbler. Each time I open the lid, fresh air (oxygen) is introduced. I then close the lid and tumble the contents a few times so that the new material is incorporated and properly mixed with the old material. I always open the lid again to see what is happening inside (I also stare at it for a while) and then close it again and leave it until the next day or two when I'm ready to add new material again.

We don't buy pre-cut & peeled packaged veggies so I have a good amount of organic waste.

The trick with successful compost is keeping an eye on the carbon:nitrogen ratio of the contents. Too much green, wet, nitrogen-rich material and you'll have a wet and smelly mush. Too much carbon-rich, dry, brown material and it will be too dry and unappealing to the composting microbes. I'm mostly using egg trays and crushed egg shells for my 'brown' with vacuum-cleaner bag contents and autumn leaves here and there.

What we've done is to include an informative graphic on the side of every YOLO Compost Tumbler that tells you what you can put into it. There is a second graphic that offers tips - like how to check whether your compost is too wet or too dry and how to tell whether your compost is ready.

The past two months have been interesting as I've been observing and learning from my own compost tumbling experience. I've developed tricks like leaving the peels from a whole watermelon out in the sun to dry out a bit before tossing them in. As the tumbler is a closed bin, moisture is retained so I'm very cautious about the wetness of the material that I throw in. How is this? Within a week I couldn't identify the watermelon peels in the tumbler!

While I've been happily playing with my YOLO Compost Tumbler and kitchen scraps, I still need to deal with the bin and my two compost piles out back. The piles can just sit for now but the bin... it is really yuck. I need a sunny day to shovel it out, let it dry (it has been rained on and it doesn't drain) and then throw the contents into a tumbler to properly mature with regular tumbling and aeration.

We've just got the small tumbler into production and Celliers is still busy with the medium (100-litre) and large (200-litre) designs and moulds. The medium will be better for all of my grass cuttings and autumn leaves. Our garden isn't big enough to warrant the large; but my mom's is.

This is a high-quality product. Steel, powder-coated frame, galvanised steel hinges and latch, robust shell rotomoulded from UV-stabilised plastic and in funky colours.

Our aim is not that you'll use this for a year or two but for a decade or two (in semi-shade it will last far, far longer than if left in all-day full sun). There is enough cheap plastic junk in landfill and my YOLO products are definitely not those. YOLO is made to last.

This is what has been keeping me busy and out of trouble.

I'll be ready to start shipping YOLO Compost Tumblers out - and around South Africa - in the next 10 days or so. I'll let you know details then.