Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: maggots and flies in compost bins

[Bob Morrison (morrison]

On Mon, 5 Dec 94, Stuart Staniford-Chen <stanifor [at] cs.ucdavis.edu> wrote:

Subject: Compost and the cohouser

> 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.

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

  I was recently talking with someone who seems to be an expert on compost
bins, and he said that maggots and flies are a problem if any meat waste is
disposed of in the compost bin, and that not putting meat waste there
prevents this problem. This solution is awkward because it's much easier to
scrape off one's plates into a single place than to put the meat waste in one
"basket" and the other food waste in another. Perhaps it's OK to put the small
amount of meat waste that comes off of plates into the compost bin if the
kitchen crew finds another place to dispose of, for example, leftover meat
that has been kept too long to be edible.

Bob Morrison

Home: Boxboro, MA               Work: Digital Equipment Corp., Littleton, MA