Hi KT. How do you keep raccoons and other monkeys away from compost with fish in it? Is that your flowtron that is back in working order? How did you finally fix it? My secret compost ingredient: bunny poop. Can't see that it actually does much to heat the pile, but I sure do have lots of it!
:)
ML

Katy, do you work in publishing? I love the way you word the titles of your threads. They could be newspaper headlines or book titles or advertising. You are a very creative and entertaining writer!

I don't have anything to add about composting, but I was compelled to double-click anyhow!!

Wendy

Poultry doody, and loads of it. With the coop bedding. I have a compost pile with lots of the aged version, but my Dirty Secret is that I top dress with raw barn-sweepings all season. When there are aleady lots of earlier layers of topdressing dating back to antiquity, they are a buffer that protects the plants from the new manure so it doesn't burn them. I just dump the daily sweep-ups on the garden and call it mulch.

Horse manure. Lots of it. Also, once a year we go into our farm pond in kayaks and waders and pull the Bul-reed which needs to be thinned annually or else it turns the pond into a swamp. We must pull 1000 pounds of the stuff, including the mud from the roots and the nutrient-rich pond water from it...it gives our manure pile a huge boost!

Nothing really dirty, or secret, lol, for that matter. But I do take a snickering pleasure in shredding all those credit card offers and other junk mail to put in my compost!

:)
Dee

Oh wait! I also compost old cotton socks and underwear. One day I was turning the compost and an old pair of my son's underwear got caught on the compost turner. I could not resist holding it up for said son and his friend to see, lol. He was not amused. (But his friend sure was, lol!)

I love this topic. You see, Im totally addicted to composting. And I have no problem airing my dirty laundry among you.
Im into recycling so anything that was once alive is fair game to me. This includes all household paper (napkins, bills, paper bags, my childs abundance of fingerpainted pictures, etc), cardboard, kitchen waste/scraps, horse manure, my neighbors lawn clippings, the 50+ lbs of starbucks coffee grounds that I add every other day, my neighbors bagged leaves....etc! It all goes in!
But I guess my dirty secret is that I micturate on the pile first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and several other times per day when I am not working.

Excess nitrogen, the warm added water....makes for a nice rich compost.

Cough, cough...hmmmmm, hmmmmm All together now! One 'ana two 'ana...

I can compost anything,
In my marvelous compost bin...

It sits behind the garden shed,
Always waiting to be fed.

Plastic ones from B&Q,
Can't do what my bin can do.

Cabbages and cauliflowers are rendered in a matter of hours,
The next door neighbor's bowling shoe, took a day...or maybe, two.

Oh, he can compost anything.
In his marvelous compost bin.

Granddad brought it home for me from a journey overseas,
When Granddad died from drinking gin...we put him in my compost bin.

Oh, he can compost anything.
In his marvelous compost bin.

Carpets, glass, and oven cleaner,
Steering wheel from a Ford Cortina,
Aunty Brenda's mobile phone are all converted into loan.

'Cuz he can compost anything,
In his marvelous compost bin.

:)

Tricia

Here is a link that might be useful: Everybody sing along now......

Toooooooo funny, Tricia! Thanks for sharing.

Tricia, OMG I thought I heard a howling in the wind last night was that everyone on this forum joining in and singing along with the three headed cauliflower? Funny thing is that tune really sticks in your headÂI can compost any thing in my marvelous compost bin
Sunshine boy, micturateÂ.excess nitrogen Oh come on fess up you know the truth is every male on the planet is always looking for a good excuse to pee outside!
Dee, He was not amused Forty five years ago I hung my sisters bra out the window for all of her friends to seeÂoddly enough she still isnÂt amused but I still get great pleasure from the memory.
Ellen, sounds like a slippery, slimy, choreÂI wish I had a pond.
Cady,
I am seriously considering chickens but am concerned about rats from what I have been told the two go hand in hand. How do folks manage that issue?
Wendy, LOLÂThanks for the overly generous thoughts but no my life is no where near that interesting. I have been considering starting a gardening blog as I would love to add video, audio, photography, and the written word to garden discussions and have a little more content freedom. WouldnÂt it be great to watch a quick 5 minute video on pruning blueberries for example? I would like to do this with a number of different folks (at least six) from the New England area so there would be a varied vision of gardening and the responsibility of keeping the blog up and running wouldnÂt be too over whelming. Anyone interested????
Mayalena,
Problems with monkeysÂyou too I thought I was the only one!! I have found the middle of my compost pile the best smell free place for dead fish carcasses, I havenÂt experienced critter problems perhaps the lack of fatsÂwho knows I just know I needed a good disposal solution and this seems to be working

KT,
The biggest rat attracters around are birdfeeders! People fill them up and ignore them, and rats feast on the fallen seed.

Chickens are far easier to keep rat-free, in my opinion, because all you need to do is keep their living area swept clean (I sweep the barn twice a day), remove food dishes at night, and periodically place rat bait (Decon is good) in the dark spots where rats like to enter and leave a barn (must be placed in a way that other animals can't get to it). I store feed in lidded, heavy-duty trashcans as well.

Chickens,
If you have an idea that they will keep down your bug population, they may. And while they are pecking around your property, they will shred your hostas, scratch up your little seedlings and poop in many places. I lived across from a dozen for several years. One became a pet, who climbed a ladder to the roof to sleep at night. The owner got rid of them when one of her horses ate hay off the barn floor that must have had chicken poop in it, cause he came down with samonella poisoning. They were history soon after.

Long ago a poster somewhere on GW suggested peafowl or guinea fowl. Cleaner and don't shred your plants.

Katy, my secret is that my yard was formerly a cow pasture so we have lovely compost for soil LOL. BTW, my friend has chickens and she did have rats until she got terriers. They keep the rat population to a minimum :o)

Dee, the story of you finding your son's underwear in the compost pile and holding it up for him and his friend to see had me laughing.

Peafowl and guineas are LOUD. Male peafowl and female guineas will get you in trouble with the noise ordinance unless you have a buffer of five acres or more.

Chickens are not a curse or burden if you prepare for them properly. I always put chickenwire around beds where tender seedlings were sprouting, or anywhere I didn't want my chooks to go. I don't let standard chickens free range, because they do scratch up a storm, as IdaBean says.

But you may want to consider bantam chickens, which are mini-chooks that can be the size of a pigeon and are far more manageable. You get cute little eggs (hey, less cholesterol) and mini poops that make good compost.

I have only three standard hens, and around 20 bantam chooks that are loads of fun and really pretty. The range of colors, feather patterns and comb shapes makes them hugely variable and entertaining to watch, and many have great personalities.

My #1 dirty secret is that I'm pathologically lazy, and that suits some plants just fine. I leave the autumn leaves under the shrubs, which is the *only* reason there are hardly any weeds in the shrub borders, and I rarely if ever cut back *anything* in the fall. Tidy up the beds for winter? I don't think so. Since I grow a lot of sub-shrubs, or perennials that behave like sub-shrubs, I accidentally provide them with what they want, which is to be left alone until spring. I don't deadhead unless absolutely necessary, so I get a lot of volunteers or plants you would not guess would self sow. Then, I let self-sowing plants bloom just about wherever they want, so right now my yard is a riot of rudbeckia, sunflowers, coreopsis, campanula, perovskia, snapdragons, nicotiana and verbena bonariensis.

Second secret: This is almost required for secret #1 to work; I have a high tolerance for chaos and a low threshold (low standards) for what I think is beautiful. Yellow, orange, pink and purple? Stunning. To me, anyway.

Third secret: I actually like plants on a sort of personal level, so even if the arrangement isn't especially well thought out, it still makes me happy. It's like being in a roomful of friends who don't know each other. I'm glad just to be there with them.

- DtD

PS. Now I'm inspired - I want an electric outlet next to my compost pile so I can shred everything too. But - don't the fish carcasses sort of slime up the shredder, Katy?