Hi everyone.

On Tue, 15 Dec 2015 20:21:21 -0000,
Phil L wrote:
I only compost what my worms can eat, contents of teabags, raw, finely
chopped peelings and leaves, newspapers etc.
Never tried them with anything cooked as i tend to add salt to things and I
don't think they'd eat it.

From my experience, the salt that you enjoy in your meals is nothing
compared to the compostable material that you put on your compost, the
worms do not care. Anyway, it is not the worms that eat your
vegetables, your meat or whatever you put on the compost. The tiny
little creatures which do most of the work, and by the way suffer most
of all from all mistreatment of the soil, are invisible to our eyes. The
worms take over long afterwards...

They don't like onions or citrus fruits.

I never asked any of the tennants of our compost heap, but both, onions
and citrus fruits vanish in our compost. The problem of citrus fruits is
complex. You cannot put them all in the same bucket and I do not want to
start a religious war.

That is about the most intelligent thing, that I can say about
composting. Know what you have and adapt to the environment that your
compost will live in.

About all that you mention in this thread *is* compostable. The problem
with *my* weeds is, that *I* do not want to survey the temperature at
the interior of the compost heap. So *I* do *not* put weeds on the
compost. If you can and have the time to survey the decaying process,
there is no reason not to do so. Rats and mice are not a problem for me,
because the compost is far away from the house and even at a distance
from the vegetable garden. Would I eat any more meat or saussage, there
would be a chance, that you found a little of both on the heap; although
this is highly improbable now. Also, there are predators which appear to
like that corner of our propriety. Why bereave them of that kind of easy
prey...

(...)
The compost is superior to anything you can buy - if used neat, it
outperforms miracle-gro compost by a mile, but i usually mix it 50/50 with
cheap no-name compost

If you can have dung from a nearby farm and can leave it three to six
months to compost either, the material will be unbeatable. ;-)

Michael

--
Location: Lower Normandy (Orne), France
New Key as of autumn 2015:
GnuPG brainpoolP512r1/5C2A258D 2015-10-02 [expires: 2017-10-01]
sub brainpoolP512r1/53461AFA 2015-10-02 [expires: 2017-10-01]

Hi again.

On Tue, 15 Dec 2015 21:57:56 -0000,
Phil L wrote:

A bloke i know has a few wormeries and he feeds his everything including
meat but I've a feeling his worms are a different strain to mine, mine are
almost exclusively earthworms, his are smaller, thinner and a slightly
different colour. And they breed like wildfire

These are in deed not the same worms.
What you have in the “wormeries� (which must be the same as the french
« Lombricomposteur » if anyone can confirm), are worms of the first
line, who eat the excrements and what's rest of the other creatures
which begin the composting proces by living on the fresh material that
you give them. Worms do not attack themselves the stuff you sort from
your kitchen or your garden.

Ordinary earth worms are normally not deployed in a wormerie.
The finer species (lombriques in french) can come from another, older
compost but have to be dislocated quickly, preferably within a small
volume of fresh compost, as they tend to die quickly.

Michael
--
Location: Lower Normandy (Orne), France
New Key as of autumn 2015:
GnuPG brainpoolP512r1/5C2A258D 2015-10-02 [expires: 2017-10-01]
sub brainpoolP512r1/53461AFA 2015-10-02 [expires: 2017-10-01]

On Tue, 15 Dec 2015 20:21:21 -0000, "Phil L"
wrote:

They don't like onions or citrus fruits.

One thing I don't understand is that lemon peel rots away in compost
heaps within a month or two but orange peel doesn't. I suppose it's
the same thing that makes them taste different.

Steve

--
Neural Network Software for Windows http://www.npsnn.com

In article ,
Tom Gardner wrote:
I may give up
on the oyster shells, which have lasted the best part of a decade,
though :-)

What did (past tense, presumably) you think would
be the breakdown process? I known chickens work
well

Yebbut, you have to break them up first, and that would be enough
in itself. The way that such things break down is that the usual
bacteria destroy the connective tissue and rain and soil acids
then dissolve the minerals. Weight-bearing bones of large, mature
mammals have a very high mineral content and take ages, and most
shellfish shells have more, but oysters seem to be exceptional.

I keep chucking them back, as I do with uncomposted bones and other
shells, but I think that I am going to start removing them. But
mussel and clam shells soften enough to break up after a few years,
and add a bit of lime. Or I may put them on a paving slab and hit
them with a club hammer :-)


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

In article , says...

In article ,
Tom Gardner wrote:
I may give up
on the oyster shells, which have lasted the best part of a decade,
though :-)

What did (past tense, presumably) you think would
be the breakdown process? I known chickens work
well

Yebbut, you have to break them up first, and that would be enough
in itself. The way that such things break down is that the usual
bacteria destroy the connective tissue and rain and soil acids
then dissolve the minerals. Weight-bearing bones of large, mature
mammals have a very high mineral content and take ages, and most
shellfish shells have more, but oysters seem to be exceptional.

I keep chucking them back, as I do with uncomposted bones and other
shells, but I think that I am going to start removing them. But
mussel and clam shells soften enough to break up after a few years,
and add a bit of lime. Or I may put them on a paving slab and hit
them with a club hammer :-)

This garden soil is acid (probably the result of years of mulching);
to counteract which I top dress hellebores and daphnes with shell grit.
When I can be bothered I collect it from the beach, but for bulk
supplies I top dress the soil by scattering 25 kilo sacks of coarse
oyster shell grit, available quite cheaply from farmfeed suppliers to
the poultry industry.

Janet

In article ,
says...

On Tue, 15 Dec 2015 20:21:21 -0000, "Phil L"
wrote:

They don't like onions or citrus fruits.

One thing I don't understand is that lemon peel rots away in compost
heaps within a month or two but orange peel doesn't. I suppose it's
the same thing that makes them taste different.

???? Mine do. We eat a lot of citrus fruit but by the time a bin is
full, none of the peels survive. Or eggshells.

The longest survivors in my bins are avocado stones, followed by
avocado skins.

Janet

On Wed, 16 Dec 2015 14:22:13 -0000, Janet wrote:

In article ,
says...

On Tue, 15 Dec 2015 20:21:21 -0000, "Phil L"
wrote:

They don't like onions or citrus fruits.

One thing I don't understand is that lemon peel rots away in compost
heaps within a month or two but orange peel doesn't. I suppose it's
the same thing that makes them taste different.

???? Mine do. We eat a lot of citrus fruit but by the time a bin is
full, none of the peels survive. Or eggshells.


I didn't mean they don't rot at all. I was pointing out that lemon
rots in a month while orange doesn't because it takes much longer than
a month.

The longest survivors in my bins are avocado stones, followed by
avocado skins.


There are avocado stones in my compost but I've never noticed how long
they have survived.

Have you ever tried eating the skin? When I was about 12 I was at a
posh dinner. The salad included chopped up avocado. I didn't know I
was supposed to cut or bite the soft part off the skin. I just chewed
it until it went down the hatch!

A quick Google finds many different sorts of avocado. They don't all
have tough skins.

Steve

--
Neural Network Software for Windows http://www.npsnn.com

On 2015-12-15, Stephen Wolstenholme wrote:

Years ago we had a huge compost heap used for any garden or kitchen
waste. Potato peelings often resulted in some potatoes growing on the
heap. The tubas they produced were perfectly edible.

But how did they sound?

(ducks)

On 2015-12-15, Nick Maclaren wrote:

In article ,
Phil L wrote:

I only compost what my worms can eat, contents of teabags, raw, finely
chopped peelings and leaves, newspapers etc.

That's a difference between a worm bin and a traditional heap, which
I use. I can and do chuck pretty well everything on and, while it
takes longer to break down, almost everything does. I may give up
on the oyster shells, which have lasted the best part of a decade,
though :-)

Avocado skins are pretty worm-resistant, IME.

On 2015-12-15, Martin wrote:

On Tue, 15 Dec 2015 21:08:24 -0000 (UTC), (Nick Maclaren)
wrote:

In article ,
Phil L wrote:

I only compost what my worms can eat, contents of teabags, raw, finely
chopped peelings and leaves, newspapers etc.

That's a difference between a worm bin and a traditional heap, which
I use. I can and do chuck pretty well everything on and, while it
takes longer to break down, almost everything does. I may give up
on the oyster shells, which have lasted the best part of a decade,
though :-)

There are piles of oyster shells left behind by the Romans at Silchester. Being
patient doesn't help/

There are still oyster shells in middens from 5000 years ago (Skara
Brae might be one of the examples).

On 2015-12-16, Stephen Wolstenholme wrote:

There are avocado stones in my compost but I've never noticed how long
they have survived.

Have you ever tried eating the skin? When I was about 12 I was at a
posh dinner. The salad included chopped up avocado. I didn't know I
was supposed to cut or bite the soft part off the skin. I just chewed
it until it went down the hatch!

It sounds quite bizarre --- to me, anyway --- that someone would chop
up an avocado with the skin still on to put in a salad.

A quick Google finds many different sorts of avocado. They don't all
have tough skins.

Except in one of those cases.

On Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:08:25 +0000, Adam Funk
wrote:

On 2015-12-16, Stephen Wolstenholme wrote:

There are avocado stones in my compost but I've never noticed how long
they have survived.

Have you ever tried eating the skin? When I was about 12 I was at a
posh dinner. The salad included chopped up avocado. I didn't know I
was supposed to cut or bite the soft part off the skin. I just chewed
it until it went down the hatch!

It sounds quite bizarre --- to me, anyway --- that someone would chop
up an avocado with the skin still on to put in a salad.


I assume it's something to with appearance.

A quick Google finds many different sorts of avocado. They don't all
have tough skins.

Except in one of those cases.

Try Google with "soft skin avocado". There are lots soft skin
varieties, even species.

The most alarming thing to me is that the skin can be poisonous.

Steve

--
Neural Network Software for Windows http://www.npsnn.com

On Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:45:36 +0000, Stephen Wolstenholme
wrote:

Try Google with "soft skin avocado". There are lots soft skin
varieties, even species.

It gets confusing when some people use avocado to produce soft skin

Steve

--
Neural Network Software for Windows http://www.npsnn.com

In article ,
says...

On Wed, 16 Dec 2015 14:22:13 -0000, Janet wrote:

In article ,
says...

On Tue, 15 Dec 2015 20:21:21 -0000, "Phil L"
wrote:

They don't like onions or citrus fruits.

One thing I don't understand is that lemon peel rots away in compost
heaps within a month or two but orange peel doesn't. I suppose it's
the same thing that makes them taste different.

???? Mine do. We eat a lot of citrus fruit but by the time a bin is
full, none of the peels survive. Or eggshells.


I didn't mean they don't rot at all. I was pointing out that lemon
rots in a month while orange doesn't because it takes much longer than
a month.

The longest survivors in my bins are avocado stones, followed by
avocado skins.


There are avocado stones in my compost but I've never noticed how long
they have survived.

Have you ever tried eating the skin?

No, but now you've suggested it, I shall have to :-O

Janet




When I was about 12 I was at a
posh dinner. The salad included chopped up avocado. I didn't know I
was supposed to cut or bite the soft part off the skin. I just chewed
it until it went down the hatch!

A quick Google finds many different sorts of avocado. They don't all
have tough skins.

Steve

On 2015-12-16, Stephen Wolstenholme wrote:

On Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:08:25 +0000, Adam Funk
wrote:

On 2015-12-16, Stephen Wolstenholme wrote:

There are avocado stones in my compost but I've never noticed how long
they have survived.

Have you ever tried eating the skin? When I was about 12 I was at a
posh dinner. The salad included chopped up avocado. I didn't know I
was supposed to cut or bite the soft part off the skin. I just chewed
it until it went down the hatch!

It sounds quite bizarre --- to me, anyway --- that someone would chop
up an avocado with the skin still on to put in a salad.


I assume it's something to with appearance.

Well, avocado turns dark from exposure to air, but that will still
happen to the cut faces.