Cohousing-L Mailing List: Medium-scale composting

[Melanie Mindlin (sassetta]

Here at Ashland Cohousing, we also really want compost for our community 
garden. It is expensive and difficult to get good quality compost on the open 
market. We have 13 homes and quite a bit of landscape weeds and prunings as 
well. We have had problems with rats in the past, and when the house next to 
the garden saw rats near our compost, they asked that we take action.

We built a 4 bin compost structure wrapped in hardware cloth on all sides. This 
was not inexpensive to build as hardware cloth is pretty pricey, plus wood and 
labor costs. It had a couple of bins with lift tops, and all the front sides 
were removable with bolts and wing nuts. Barrels would not have held the amount 
of compost we make.

We never quite understood why there there were still rats in the compost, but 
I’m pretty sure that when they were still small, the baby rats could squeeze 
through either the tiny cracks where the bin tops lifted or, more likely, right 
through the hardware cloth itself. Then they would be trapped inside the cage 
when they got larger and couldn’t get out. This left us with annoying and 
somewhat frightening rats in a cage at our compost. Trapping was not anyone’s 
favorite job. Without consensus, I left the cages open sometimes and the rat 
problem went away. Over the years, our expensive compost bins deteriorated and 
no longer closed properly, and have now been abandoned. 

We have not seen any rats around the compost for years. 

It is hard to get our residents to use best practices when delivering compost 
to the composting area, and it often has scraps exposed on the top and other 
messiness. However, I haven’t seen meat or cooked food there, so I think folks 
are at least following this basic principle for keeping rats out of your 
compost. Don’t put meat or left-overs with oils and other tasty attractants in 
your compost—raw fruit and vegetable scraps only please!

A few of us including me, also compost in our backyards. I saw some rats near 
the compost the year that we built our compost bins. I have not seen a single 
rat since then (over ten years). I think we were having an ecospasm of rats in 
our area the year that they were seen. Also, some neighbors (not in our 
Cohousing) had chickens near the garden area and the complaining member’s home. 
Chicken coops often attract rats with their scattered chicken feed. 

We are still challenged with best practices for making compost, but manage to 
meet most of our compost needs through our process.

Hope this helps,
Melanie


> On May 9, 2022, at 3:16 AM, cohousing-l-request [at] cohousing.org wrote:
> 
> Subject: [C-L]_ Medium-scale composting ?
> Message-ID: <69BBBF36-B52C-4D9F-A06A-5794776445B5 [at] garlic.com 
> <mailto:69BBBF36-B52C-4D9F-A06A-5794776445B5 [at] garlic.com>>
> Content-Type: text/plain;     charset=us-ascii
> 
> I am a relatively new member of a very suburban co-housing community. The 
> community composted for a long time, but apparently the effort fell apart as 
> members aged and rats moved in. I am volunteering to research how we might 
> re-start. 
> 
> We have 29 units and there is municipal composting by law in California and 
> at our community, but many of us have garden plots and spend a lot on compost 
> we might make. Does anyone out there do composting on this medium scale? 
> Should we consider a worm farm? Have you constructed rat-proof bins? Any 
> experiences or resources of interest! 
> 
> Leah Halper
> Yulupa Cohousing, Santa Rosa