What do you put in a compost bin?

[juicychops]

my council sell them for only £8 so thinking of getting one to keep in the garden.

but what exactly do you put in it?

and what dont you put in it?

grass cuttings go in it

veg peelings

egg boxes (i think)

some fabrics/textiles can be composted too

apart from all our vegetable peelings, dead flowers, egg shells etc we put all our shredded paper (you know reciepts and stuff with our address on )...to balance out green and brown compost waste.

Am not an expert but I think if all you stick in is planty/veg/grass clippings you get a very wet slimy compost.

Don't put cooked stuff in esp meat as you'll get rats.

how bout mouldy and unused raw veg/ fruit/ salad stuff?

that goes in definately.

cool. I think i will investin this compost thing then. How long does it take roughly for stuff to decompose so you can use it as compost?

I read in organic life the other day that you can put anything which has lived, clothes -wise so pure cotton anything etc. He said it decomposes best if it's soaked in urine! This interesting fact intrigued me and I can't get the picture of my FIL weeing into his compost bin out of my head!

ha ha!! rather gross though.

can tissues and kitchen roll etc be but in? i expect they would rot away wouldn't they? sont know what tissues are made out of (tissue?)

yeah - tissue paper is fine and card board.

i think it takes 9-12 months.we got middle size-£10 one of council,its huge!

Cardboard tubes from toilet rolls - can you get a wormery, much more fun!

yeah - 'cause then you can pour the 'juice' on your garden - great for plants.

And have a patch of lovely grass where you spill it. And talk about worms hating citrus! Coffee and tea are good, kind of half composted to begin with.

poster who said that you can put anything into a compost bin that has once been alive is quite right. Tissues (wood fibres once upon a long time ago) can go in, natural clothing, cooked food, raw food, really - anything that has lived.

In Theory.

In Reality, some of those things are not desirable to have rotting in the garden. Eventually, they will make a good compost, but the short term costs of rats, scavengers, smells and so on are not so nice and can be a public health risk. If you want to compost ALL your food waste (including cooked 'remains' - meat/fish etc) try a bokashi first as the enzymey-microbes break it down mega fast so its safe to then put into the garden composter.

Also, think about what you will use the compost for. Although weeds will rot down (and so in theory can go in the composter) do you really want the possibility of the roots/seeds of perennial weeds being spread all over your borders again next year.

I empty the contents of the Dyson into ours. It's meant to have nitrogens in it which speed up the decomposing process.

no protein

therefore we put in fruit / veg peelings etc
tea bags
garden waste
the fluff that comes out of the hoover
the fluff from the tumble dryer

we are gonna have a urinal installed to go direct to compsot as well as urine is good for it

Can I put the waste hay from the guinea pig cage in? It isn't allowed in the brown bin so has to go into household rubbish and takes up quite a percentage of my bin.

According the book I have on composting, you should only put the contents of your vacuum cleaner in if you have carpets made of natural fibres.

We can put any food scraps in ours, including meat and fish. All green garden waste and branches as long as they are not too big. Basically anything that can be eaten by man or beast! We have a fantastic re-cycling system in our borough and it has cut the non-recyling rubbish down by about 2 sack loads a week.