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Gardening

Find tips and tricks to make your garden or allotment flourish on our Gardening forum.

Smelly compost bin

5 replies

Tzes · 17/07/2021 15:42

With the arrival of the sun we are sitting out in the garden more and so experiences the delights of the compost bin. Is there anything we can do to make it less smelly and less sludgy?

We use it for all kitchen stuff - peelings, left over food, egg shells etc but dont have much garden material beyond grass cuttings every few weeks. There also always seems to be lots of maggots and flies in it -how can we reduce these?

Is there a strong sweet smelling bush we can put alongside it?

Our garden is a fairly small terraced house town garden and due to the layout there is nowhere really to hide the bin away so we are stuck inhaling the smell.

Any advice welcomed!

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ButForTheGrace · 17/07/2021 15:50

Sounds too green. Add some layers of ripped up paper or cardboard. Should soon come back in to balance. Finish with a layer of paper/card to keep the flies away from the veg/fruit

ButForTheGrace · 17/07/2021 15:52

Also, because of the imbalance it's probably sat there rotting rather than composting. If you're not overlooked by neighbours, get DH to have a sneaky wee or 2 in there.

NoSquirrels · 17/07/2021 18:17

Do you mean a bin the council empties - your green waste bin?

Or do you mean you’re making compost?

NoSquirrels · 17/07/2021 18:19

For the maggots & flies, that’s from your cooked food waste. So stop chucking that in. There are special systems if you want to compost cooked food, meat etc - they have to get hotter than a normal compost bin.

Tzes · 18/07/2021 11:24

Ok thanks for the responses - yes it does seem to be rotting rather than composting. Its a normal compost bin with 300 litres capacity or so. Council do offer collection but we havent really used that .

I will start by not putting the cooked food in and also add more newspapers.

On occasions DH has suggested he is happy to contribute liquids to it so I may take him up... Although logistics of him doing so may be tricky.

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