In the fall of 2025, I had a vision for a composting sink where I could run food waste through a disposal and have it drain into a compost box.

I designed a 4x4x4 vented compost box with three sliding doors. I lined it with hardware cloth to keep critters out.

I laid 30 feet of 2-inch PVC across the yard from the edge of the deck to the future home of the compost box.

Dug a 2-foot-deep trench and tamped paver base until it was level.

It was winter at this point, and the ground was wet and not draining well. So I improvised a bit and created a French drain in the lowest corner and dug channels to route water into the drain.

But the winter got wetter, exacerbating the drainage problems. One dark and stormy evening, I decided the window for getting the box in the trench is about to close. Snow was predicted on the valley floor. So, enduring heavy rain and wind, my partner and I rolled the box from the deck to the fence. Once the box was on the edge of the trench, we could not muster up enough leverage to move it into its home. I ran back to the garage, grabbed two six-foot fence pickets. We wedged them under the box and into the trench. It slid right in, perhaps helped by the rain! The box landed with a thud in a pretty good spot, not that it mattered because we couldn’t move it if we tried!

In gradeschool I learned that something like this may have been used to build the Great Pyramids of Giza.

I routed the drain pipe up to where I wanted the sink and drilled a hole in the back of the sink cabinet to match.

Had to get some bespoke parts to adapt the disposal to the outdoor sink. The folks at Western Nevada Supply Company Blue Team were super helpful and very patient with me as an amateur. I dry fitted everything in the living room. The kids took it apart and put it back together again countless times.

I installed the disposal, easy peasy.

Finally, I connected the drain to a winterizable 45-degree fitting, and just like that, it worked on the first try.

The finished compost bin, which is also on an independent drip line so that its contents can be regularly misted during the hotter months. We have last year's garden in there, my epic ginger plant, and lots of disposal pulp that I mix and turn into the compost every couple of days.