Compost

[ailbhe]

Our wormery has failed again. Basically, the kind and quantity of food waste we generate is beyond a wormery. So I've ordered a couple of bokashi bins to use in rotation, and some new worms to hopefully finish off what's failing to compost in the actual wormery. We've also started digging out the raw food waste/garden waste composter and we're getting lovely dirt out of it for our friends with gardens.

Wish us luck.

Comments

[k425.livejournal.com]

During my first marriage we had a small wormery, which couldn't keep up with the waste produced by two people, and then a larger wormery, which couldn't cope with the waste produced by two people, and we weren't exactly huge chuckers-away of compostable food. So I've been unimpressed with wormeries.

[buzzy-bee.livejournal.com]

We had a wormery at work and all I can say is that worms cannot survive on teabags and banana peelings.

[rpdom.livejournal.com]

I don't have a wormery, but I do have a couple of large compost bins full of garden waste, vegetable peelings and horse output. These are rotting down nicely, helped by lots of worms and woodlice and produce some excellent compost to improve the horrible soil we have around here.

Good luck with your new bins, I look forward to hearing how they perform :)

[liasbluestone.livejournal.com]

We got a Green Johanna (http://www.greencone.com/home.asp?lang=1) for a very sensible price via a council discount scheme.

It's handling pretty much everything we throw into it, and producing very nice compost.
Except for bones that is - the chicken bones are turning up at the bottom pretty much unchanged, so we've had to stop putting those in. Everything else goes in though, and it just about keeps up with us on kitchen and garden waste. It is big though.

You can still ....

[(Anonymous)]

... get a Green Cone for £14 from them too - Reading Council discount. We have had ours for ages - 18 months? 2 years? - though have still not installed it, and this means that there are still less than 1500 people who have taken advantage of this offer in Reading. Does need to be in the sun though, as they say (my inlaws had one but put it in a shady bit of their garden for some reason, and it really didn't work).

Re: You can still ....

[(Anonymous)]

That was me of course.

Alison

Re: You can still ....

[ailbhe]

I kind of want someone else on the street to try one first as they're a lot of work if we're not well-drained enough. I think we could give it a sunny spot though.

[sidheag.livejournal.com]

We have a wormery (a Can'o'worms) which we feed from our bokashi bins (plus lots and lots of shredded paper - getting too wet is apparently the main problem). Our worms seem very happy at the moment, but the pipeline is not (yet) stable, so sometimes we end up throwing away compostable stuff because one bokashi bin is full and the worms are still eating through the other.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

I've never tried a wormery - would like to because I think you can use cooked food waste, right? We do have a normal compost bin, which just about handles the fruit and veg waste from our household, and finally (after taking about 2 years to settle in, and us learning how and what to feed it) produces excellent compost, though not enough for our tiny but intensively planted garden.

Funny, I'm so surprised that you don't have a garden!

[ailbhe]

We have a garden for playing in but have had to admit defeat with growing things, though we hope that this year might be the year we grow real grass. I think we might do fairly well with food-from-big-plant-pots and a grassy bit for playing on; I can't see either Rob or me learning to be proper gardeners any time soon. In principle I'd love to, in practice it doesn't happen.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

I am becoming a bigger and bigger fan of growing things in pots. Easier to defend from predators and small children. And they look so nice, too. I am gardening reasonably steadily this year; in previous years I've tended to have a planting frenzy then not kept up with the needs of the resulting plants. This year, started late but am doing well. Next year, I'm going to make a plan, and do staggered planting, and all sorts.

Re: Compost

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

that seems to happen to a lot of wormeries i've known of. i never had a real one.

have you tried bokashi before? i'm getting real curious about it, especially because the smell of rotting veggie matter isn't my favourite thing in the whole world, and from the reports i've read bokashi smells rather a lot better.

Re: Compost

[ailbhe]

I've never tried bokashi before. We may end up with three tiers - raw food in the wormery (much drier), other stuff in the bokashi bin, and gunge from either tipped onto the garden waste compost bin, which takes grass cuttings and tree prunings and so on.

The idea of landfilling compostable stuff annoys the hell out of me.