Trommels can be handy for sifting and sorting many things like garden soil and compost. In this video I make one from a Harbor Freight Cement Mixer, and an old 55 gallon barrel.

Gardening in rocky heavy clay soil isn't much fun, and the only solution is adding organic matter to the soil. Compost around here is either really expensive or very low quality so I make my own. The hardest part of making good compost is sifting it. So I finally got around to solving that problem. I can also use the tromel to sift the rocks out of my own top soil so it can be used in planters and raised garden beds. My 106 gallon Jora compost tumbler produces about 50 gallons of finished compost with each fill up. It's insulated so it still works in the winter time, but the winter compost tends to be really wet making it much harder to sift than when it's made during warmer weather. During the warm months it can churn out a batch every two weeks, I just never have enough time to sift it that often. Since this has worked out so well I have opened up and joined together some of my homemade concrete remesh tomato cages to use as additional compost towers. I'm hoping to produce a total of 500 gallons of finished compost by April 15th. I need that much to fill the portable raised bed pallet planters I'm building. The first 4'x4' planter can be seen in the background of the video. It's not yet finished, but it will be getting filled with this batch of compost so I can get the potatoes planted in it next month. I like growing potatoes, but it's always 100 degrees outside at harvest time. With the pallet planter I can move the whole planter into the garage and harvest them at night when it cools down some.

Contents of Video

00:00 Introduction
01:02 Opening up eye bolts
05:35 Barrel mounted
07:02 Sifting Compost