Saturday May 17th, 2008
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What About Fruit Flies?
Posted by Jeremy Lehrer on April 30, 2007 - 5:57am.
Last week: The Golden Ratio
Compost provides life-giving nourishment to plants, because the nutrients in it are more readily available to flora than they would be in your run-of-the-till soil. As I was doing some outreach last weekend at the Park Slope Food Coop, I realized that the composting class is having a similarly nurturing effect on me: I'm becoming more deeply intertwined with, and gaining better access to, the "nutrients" and resources in my community. The course is providing us MCs entrée to a whole network of local sustainability-in-action-food coops, community gardens, botanic gardens, local grown foods, large-scale composting operations.
The decision to compost, in effect, has led me to see the ecology of people and soil in a completely different way, but let me get down to brass tacks: As part of my Master Composter training, I signed up to answer questions at the Coop for a few hours, thinking that this would be a great activity for Earth Day ‘07. The questions were both illuminating and inspiring, and I thought I would briefly share some Q&As in the hopes that they'll be helpful for all you existing composters or 'posters-to-be out there.
One of my initial visitors asked what to do about fruit flies that are drawn to an indoor worm bin. First, be sure to wash (or freeze) fruit rinds and banana peels you're planning to compost, because the fruit fly eggs invariably embedded on the outside of most fruits will otherwise hatch when they're in your pile. To deal with an existing fruit fly quandary, you can build a trap to draw them away; and make sure that you're covering your food scraps with plenty of browns on top, which will prevent flybys from sensing the food.
Other questions that came up: Can you compost eggshells? Yup, they're a good source of calcium and carbon. Can you put in meat? No, nor should you put in other foods like dairy products that would putrify as they decompose. Will outdoor composting draw pests? Shouldn't, since a) these creatures have plenty of other food sources that they'd prefer and b) if your bin is properly sealed off with wire mesh, and if you layer enough browns on both top and bottom of the pile, you won't attract organisms other than the critters you want.
A consistent theme throughout the day was that people are somewhat intimidated about having worms at home. They're slimy, they're gross, they might try to escape from the bin. (They don't, because they stay with the food source, and they couldn't survive very long outside of the bin). I confess that I had these hang-ups, too, until I got the bin going. Now I find them fascinating. The red wigglers don't bite, they have five hearts, they're healthy eaters yet they're fine if you leave on vacation for two weeks; they naturally and very happily reduce your carbon footprint. Is this not the ideal pet?
Next Week: Steaming Compost
Image: National Institutes of Health
Topics:
- Gardening
- compost
- compost bin
- composting
- Global Worming
- Live the Change
- master composter
- vermicomposting
I don't have a backyard, so I save my kitchen scraps and compost them in a worm bin underneath the kitchen table. I highly recommend this method, which you can find out more about in the Global Worming introduction and in this superb step-by-step visual tutorial.
As far as actual stats, I would guess that a relatively small percentage of city dwellers compost in their homesteads. But then again, until recently, not many folks had installed a compact fluorescent light bulb in their home, either, so I'm optimistic that more and more people will be making home vermicompost in the very very near future.
Good question. I haven't yet harvested the compost in the bin I've set up, but I plan to use it for some houseplants. The quantity of it will be more than I can use at home, however, but since there are a couple of community gardens in my area, I plan to do some outreach and spread the dirt, as it were. Plus, I have a friend who has a large backyard garden who has expressed interest in taking some compost castings.
That's what's nice about the composting process; it encourages you to share the good stuff that you've created by reaching out to community and friends, which also helps to encourage other people to compost.