Recently i’ve found myself spending an awful lot of time out by the compost piles, sifting the rocks out of the horse manure and twigs out of the rough compost, using a simple wire mesh. It’s slow, and takes a lot of energy. Hoping to find a better way, i searched the internet. There are a lot of different ideas out there.

Homemade Compost Sifter Screen Sieve shows the basic idea of making the screen slide, so you don’t have to hold it up. That’s the guy in the picture (that’s not me, although that’s exactly how i’m sifting now). Here are some detailed plans for how to make it with a slider, and some other people show how to build it with wheels. Some other people have built a rotating drum which looks nifty, and google even turns up some patents on that design.

Then, at the higher end, there are some big designs with serious motors, multiple screens, the sort of thing you’d want a front-loader to move your compost with. That’s out of my range.

So, i think we’re going to try building the slider approach, perhaps a bit bigger so it fits on the cart, which is bigger than the wheelbarrow. It’s a lot of work sifting an entire pickup truckload of manure!