Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Medium-scale composting

[Nancy Morehouse (nmorehouse]

Hi,

Wolf Creek Lodge Grass Valley, CA has been composting since we opened nearly 10 
years ago.  We are using barrel quick composters.  I am not the Compost queen 
but am including Queen Gayle Carter's email and will forward this to her as 
well.

Nancy Morehouse

> On May 9, 2022, at 12:58 PM, Melanie Mindlin <sassetta [at] mind.net> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
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