Composting meat and dairy

[ottawagardener]

Chicken mouse rugby, friendly pitch fork stabbing and hamster mummies huh - the compost thread gets gruesome. :0

So far, I am composting everything except large amounts of oil in boxes under a heavy metal grill. A rather chubby looking dog did come by to investigate but didn't try to hard to get in. So far, things are still cooking but sometime in winter, the pile usually freezes so it's more like I'm stockpiling material for the big thaw in the spring.

[seedywen]

Speaking of barnyard rugby!

When a duck nabs a big Banana slug in the garden, I feel like I'm in the stands, cheering for the duck teams.
The chase! The tackle!
Sometimes even a scrum

[mnjrutherford]

The more you guys talk about your compost... the more I like my TP pits... YIKES!

[steev]

I liked banana slugs a lot better before I found out how much they like fresh dogdoo. Nature, brown in tooth and claw. Coolest thing to visit my compost pile was a road-runner, hunting lizards, I suppose.

[lavandulagirl]

I don't compost meat or dairy, but mostly because I feed it to the animals. We don't butcher, ourselves, so the amount we have is negligible. I suppose I could collect the bones from certain meals, but the amount we have is so negligible. Due to bears in the area, I would prefer to burn them first, as mentioned, and it would take A LOT of meals to fill the burn barrel, I think. All meat scrap and cheese scrap goes to the dogs or the chickens. Same with the small amount of cooking oil we might scrape out of pans. Eggs (We don't eat cracked ones from the coop) or eggshells do get composted, though, if I'm not feeding the shells back to the chickens that day. Out of curiosity, do those products (the softmeat/offal and cheese rinds) add something to the soil that might be necessary? I can't think of any, but that doesn't mean anything, really. ;D

[mnjrutherford]

Jan 1, 2011 12:29:34 GMT -5 lavandulagirl said:

I don't compost meat or dairy, but mostly because I feed it to the animals. We don't butcher, ourselves, so the amount we have is negligible. I suppose I could collect the bones from certain meals, but the amount we have is so negligible. Due to bears in the area, I would prefer to burn them first, as mentioned, and it would take A LOT of meals to fill the burn barrel, I think. All meat scrap and cheese scrap goes to the dogs or the chickens. Same with the small amount of cooking oil we might scrape out of pans. Eggs (We don't eat cracked ones from the coop) or eggshells do get composted, though, if I'm not feeding the shells back to the chickens that day. Out of curiosity, do those products (the softmeat/offal and cheese rinds) add something to the soil that might be necessary? I can't think of any, but that doesn't mean anything, really. ;D

Well, all living tissue is carbon based, right? So the "cooking" process sort of breaks down the elements of whatever goes in, right? This is presumption on my part. I don't know if this is actually true or not from the scientific point of view. But when you consider that compost proves itself as a soil amendment, then you look at... ::sigh:: you know, my favorite stuff, TP... well, I just think that it must really be everything in combination that makes it so great. Not just this and that. It's a garbage pit after all. Not a cake batter. Cakes use a few things, the garbage can takes everything.

I'm really not expressing myself very well I'm afraid. Hope you understand what I'm trying to say here.

[steev]

To the extent that these meat/dairy wastes have protein, they add nitrogen to the soil, as well as calcium to some degree, as well as other elements, of course. In short, it's somewhat good for the soil ecosystem for the same reasons it's good for us. One of the more simple ways of looking at the difference between plants and animals is to see them as arrayed along a continuum from fiber to protein. In compost terms, from browns to greens.
As for cake/garbage, granted cake generally tastes better to us, but that's so anthropocentric. Clearly the garbage has overwhelmingly broader appeal to the larger community, on which we depend utterly.

[Alan]

We tend to compost everything, and by everything I do mean everything, either via vermiculture or via thermophylic composting, we have had no real issue with animals getting into the compost, but we do have an explosion of black fly larvae in the summer time in the worm house, this however is not a negative as they too are also used for cold composting just like the red worms but are really in many way far more efficient than red worms at breaking down and converting organic matter into fine quality compost. We don't try to encourage them or foster them, but if I could learn a bit more about their culture I would jump all over it as I think it would be a fantastic alternative.

However like lavandulagirl above, I am now converting waste meat and table scraps into feed for the animals at the expense of the compost, luckily however that gives plenty of compostible manure to feed back to the worm heard.

[coppice]

No matter if it goes into the chicken before chicken poo goes into the compost. It all ends up in the right place, your garden.

I had'ta re-read the Humanure Handbook a couple days ago. Worth firing up a google search for. I haven't read it inna while...

[ottawagardener]

Here's a link: weblife.org/humanure/

[spud]

I haven't composted meat or dairy in the past, just buried it someplace in the garden. I now plan on putting it in my worm bins after it get's bokashi composted. I haven't started bokashi yet but started my own EM today.

Can't say enough good thing about the worms, free and highly nutriutous food for ducks and chickens.

[extremegardener]

We compost everything except grease - at one point I was using it on wooden tool handles (veg oil), and also for slowing down rot in wood that is in contact with earth. We generate very little grease, and not many meat scraps (I'm a vegetarian, my husband is not). The compost area includes "holding" areas for different kinds of compost ingredients, one of which is a pit for dumping wet stinky stuff when it's not possible to make hot compost (November - April). Critters - mainly skunks, raccoons, crows and ravens with an occasional dog do sometimes dig in to get meat scraps, but it's really not too much of a problem.
I did have an interesting experience this past summer with dairy by-products in the garden.
We get raw milk from a neighbor and make yogurt, kefir, cheese, etc, and I figured that the whey from cheesemaking would be dynamite for watering/feeding cucurbits. So, I tried this out on melons soon after setting out the transplants. Unfortunately, the whey attracted either a skunk or a raccoon, who totally dug up all the seedlings that had been watered with whey.... bummer....

[steev]

Yeah, you've got to be careful what you put where. Fish emulsion for tree-fertilizer equals wild pig bait and uprooted trees on my farm. Always a learning experience.

[extremegardener]

Yikes! Wild pigs in the garden - that's scary to contemplate!

[steev]

At least they can be shot, if seen. The elk are verboten, sigh.