Compost and the cohouser
From: Stuart Staniford-Chen (staniforcs.ucdavis.edu)
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 94 01:08 CST
I was chatting with one of my neighbours the other day, and we were talking 
about our community compost boxes, which aren't holding up as well as we 
had hoped.  They are made from recycled redwood fence boards, but the 
redwood seems to be rotting out fairly quickly, especially in the first box 
(where most of the decomposition takes place).  It looks like we'll have to 
replace them in a year or two.

I was wondering how you folks compost, what materials you used for the 
boxes, and how well they have held up?

We've also had rather a problem with flies breeding in our bins.  We live 
in a very hot climate, and all our houses compost food waste religiously.  
This means that we have rather a high proportion of food in the compost, 
especially in midsummer.  Most of us just leave grass clippings on the 
lawn, so we don't have that supply.  The wet high-nitrogen environment 
seems to lend itself to maggots.

We have found that flyproofing the compost bins helps somewhat while it 
stays tight.  We have added grass clippings/leaves from outside which helps 
- but we can't always get them.  Turning the compost every couple of days 
helps - but we don't always have the energy.  

Have other groups had compost fly problems, and what helped?

Stuart.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Stuart Staniford-Chen           |       Dept of Computer Science
stanifor [at] cs.ucdavis.edu            |       UC Davis, Davis, CA 95616
(916) 752-2149  - work          |               and
(916) 756-8697  - home          |       N St. Cohousing Community
Home page is http://everest.cs.ucdavis.edu/~stanifor/home.html

Results generated by Tiger Technologies Web hosting using MHonArc.