On Fri, 2 Oct 2015 00:51:53 -0400, songbird
wrote:

Drew Lawson wrote:
...
I've never personally noticed a composting problem with bananas,
and my wife used to buy a lot of them (and eat 3/4 of those). The
peels, exposed on the surface, seem slow to break down, but inside
the pile, like butter.

if you're worried about pesticides in bananas
harming your compost you could always buy organic
bananas...

i've been worm composting banana peels for years
now and the worms take care of them fairly quickly.
if you bury them in the bins they don't smell or
cause any issues apart from the common sense ones
you'll develop as you learn how to worm compost.

the issues of fermenting and causing problems
would be if you put a huge amount of them in a
very small bin all at once which can overload it.
but if you have that much to do you can refrigerate
it or freeze chunks of it and add it over time to
give the system time to digest it.

my response here to peak demand loads is to
keep enough bins of worms to handle them. so when
Ma decides to make fruit salad for a hundred i
have enough bins to put all the scraps in at one
shot. no smell, no mess, just some time spent
cutting things up so they fit and the worms take
care of it all in a few days or a few weeks/months
depending upon what it is (melon rinds are gone
within days, pineapple tops and cores may take a
few months).


songbird

Much of what folks compost over time I compost in less than 24
hours... everything that vegetarian critters eat goes on the lawn in
my back yard... amazing how much kitchen scrap and garden waste deer,
Canada geese, woodchucks, rabbits, and other critters will process
into fertilizer within hours... even meat fat/trimmings are composted;
crows miss nothing. My composter handles what critters won't eat;
coffee grounds, tea bags, onion trimmings, potato parings, citrus,
berry cores, grape stems, and many other items, even shredded paper. I
don't put melon rinds in my composter, during warm weather melon rinds
are a good source of water for many critters, even song birds. Banana
peels take too long to compost and critters won't eat them, those get
tossed into a hedgerow or under a spruce tree where they wither away
but it can take a few years... I don't go through more than a couple
three dozen bananas in a year... over ripe bananas go into baked goods
(muffins) and smoothies. Uh oh, one of my resident composter
families just landed, first place they head is to my office window
where earlier I put out seeds for song birds, I'll put out more seeds
later when the geese move on to their main job of fertilizing several
acres of lawn, mother goose stands guard:
http://i60.tinypic.com/9a4pqf.jpg
They do a great job of organically fertilizing my trees... there's my
composter behind my vegetable garden. This family was born here, they
like that tree because I used to have a small plastic pool the
http://i60.tinypic.com/1zmi35y.jpg
Hey guys, union break is over:
http://i58.tinypic.com/28u75u1.jpg
That's better:
http://i60.tinypic.com/2i08aw3.jpg
Often there'll be over a hundred geese munching away from early light
until sundown... there will be herds of deer too. But most of my
composting is done by building several mountainess brush piles in the
woods... clearing brush here is a never ending job.