On 18/12/2018 11:02, Nick Maclaren wrote:
In article ,
Derek wrote:

I am on an allotment facebook site, thousands of users, and this topic
is often debated
Many will say never put on your compost meat or cooked veg, now I can
see the vermin loving the meat but cooked veg? But that is trotted out
by many every time.
So putting veg in water, boiling, then adding to the compost heap
attracts rats?
Yet another urban myth, unless you can prove differntyl , I can't

It's an urban myth. Meat is a problem only if you put large amounts
of it on the heap, and have foxes (or cats) - bones etc. aren't and
burying it quite shallowly protects it from cats. Despite claims,
rats are NOT preferential carnivores and will ignore meat if there
is anything better to eat.

If the composer has a tight fitting lid the chances of any large
carnivore entering is vanishingly small. Anything burrowing in from
below is likely to aerate the heap thus doing some good

I wonder if many of the gardening myths have come down through our
Victorian heritage when books written on gardening assumed that you
employed a head gardener with at least 6 under-gardeners who all had to
be given mundane tasks to undertake during the slack winter months?

It's much like old advice on pruning roses. You can spend hours with
secateurs or you can spend 5 minutes with a hedge trimmer! The
difference, especially for a local council short of man-power, is the
short term cosmetic look until the plant quickly recovers.

Plants in the wild survive quite well without the human intervention
suggested in many gardening books and without the wisdom of many urban
gardening myths.

I have no idea where the delusion about cooked vegetables came from,
but it shows a complete lack of contact with reality.

All my cooked vegetable waste goes on my compost heap. I too fail to see
why there any advice against doing so.


--
mailto : news {at} admac {dot} myzen {dot} co {dot} uk