As long as we have been gardening, we have had a compost pile, the idea being to produce a continuous supply of soil amendment and fertilizer for our vegetable garden and to let kitchen and garden waste decompose somewhere besides the trash can. We’ve always gone in for freestanding piles, which are more challenging but give you a reason to feel smug when they work.

Managed properly, a freestanding pile can maintain an internal temperature above the 115-degree threshold for fast decomposition. However, the same pile left to its own devices will be less efficient.

Over the past few years, marauding animals and my own lack of time to tend the piles have put a dent in our compost output. One day in December, as I reflected on the coming gardening season and what I’d like to do differently this time out, I decided to take the plunge. In a moment of wanton consumer excess, I dialed ComposTumbler’s toll-free number and plunked down the winter sale price  $265 plus shipping  on the 9 1/2-bushel model.

Investing in ‘brown gold’

As I made the call, I experienced the same sense of resigned anticipation that I felt when I bought my first microwave oven some 20 years ago. After swearing for years that I was above the temptation of an extraneous piece of technology, I was giving in.

Since I started reading gardening magazines, I had managed to turn the page when the ComposTumbler ad appeared. The ad typically shows a happy gardener loading grass clippings into the drum of the ComposTumbler next to a second photo of two tanned Popeye forearms, with hands clasped together, cradling a mound of finished compost. The text in the ad tells me that if I simply turn the crank on my ComposTumbler once a day, I too can make “brown gold” in just two weeks.

Now I found myself giddily, and a bit guiltily, looking forward to giving the drum on my own ComposTumbler a spin, the gardener’s version of the wheel of fortune. No more turning the pile with a hay fork, no more fretting over internal temperatures; from now on the metal barrel of the ComposTumbler would do all the cooking, and all I would have to do is rotate the drum.

The only thing missing was the remote control.

Some assembly required

The ComposTumbler arrived in a large, surprisingly flat box a few weeks later, and the FedEx man groaned as he lugged it to the porch, where I left it overnight.

The box had split open just enough to let Roscoe the garden dog get a whiff of a 2-pound bag of compost activator that was inside. He ate most of that and scattered many of the smaller parts throughout the yard. I never did find the assembly instructions, but the ComposTumbler people kindly faxed me another set.

They should have faxed me one of Santa’s elves, too. Assembly involves correctly matching approximately 140 nuts, bolts, washers and other small parts to holes in large pieces of sheet metal and steel tubing.

The tool list, which calls for three wrenches, pliers and two screwdrivers, is cruelly optimistic. By the end of the three-hour assembly project, we also had used a pipe clamp, a hammer, a power screwdriver and at least three wrenches not mentioned in the instructions.

Eventually, we got the thing put together, and the contents of the flat box are now a ComposTumbler drum on a stand. The belly has a diameter of 2 1/2 feet, the same as its measurement from end to end.

Two round aeration vents in the door to the drum look like eyes, making the green contraption look like the evil insect in a black-and-white science fiction movie from the 1950s. I suppose there’s a certain justice in that, as well as in the difficulty of putting the thing together. We’ll see this spring whether the hassle involved in doing an end run on Mother Nature is worth it in the end.

 When she’s not writing about foods and gardening, Gwyn Mellinger is teaching journalism at Baker University. Her phone number is (785) 594-4554.