Small urban garden, a closed tumbler and a bokashi bucket, foxes on the street and rats in the alley behind. I throw away chicken carcasses and bones most weeks and it feels absurd when I am composting everything else. I want to know whether the rule is about what breaks down or about what turns up at night. If it is the second, is there a version of this that works in a garden like mine?
I put fish scraps in a plastic tumbler once, on the theory that a sealed drum was rat proof. Rats chewed a hole through the base within four days, and I then had a tumbler with a hole and a rat problem instead of just a rat problem. Sealed is not the same as rodent proof.
Check what your council collection takes before doing anything clever. Plenty of kerbside food waste schemes accept cooked food, meat and bones because the industrial process runs hot enough, and that is a free solution that requires nothing from your garden.
Pushing back slightly on the blanket no. In a proper hot heap that is holding well above 50C, small amounts of meat buried in the centre vanish in about a week and never smell, and municipal systems handle meat routinely for exactly that reason. The catch is that a hot heap needs volume, roughly a cubic metre, and a tumbler in a small garden will never be that. So the rule is right for you, but it is a rule about your equipment rather than about meat.
Bones are a separate question and the answer is no on any home timescale. I put chicken bones through a hot heap that ran well for a whole season and sieved them out looking bleached but entirely intact a year later. Soft meat scraps go, bones stay, and you will be picking them out of finished compost forever.
Or dry them hard, smash them and add the fragments, which does break down eventually. Most people will not bother and that is a perfectly reasonable choice.
Bleached and intact a year later is exactly the outcome I was picturing. Bones can go in the bin then.
Meat out, bokashi or council. Fat and dairy are worse than meat for smell and nobody warns you about that.
@soloseat_sana · 4w ago · 3 replies
It is a pest and smell rule, not a chemistry rule. Meat rots down perfectly well, it just does it smelly and slow at the temperatures a home pile actually holds, and the smell is an advert. Tumblers are the worst case for this because they almost never reach and hold real heat, so in your garden with foxes and rats I would keep meat out of the tumbler entirely and use the bokashi bucket for it.
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@notetaking_ivo · 4w ago
Trench it. Dig thirty centimetres down in a bed you are not planting for a month, tip it in, cover it properly and firm the soil. It disappears fast because it is already pickled.
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@septic_sean · 4w ago
So the bokashi bucket I already own is the answer and the tumbler never was. What do I do with the bucket contents in a small garden?
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