composting dog feces
by Jon
(Long Beach, CA USA)
I know not to put food scraps in that bin so I added an additional bin for my food scraps. What is the best composting techniques for cooked & non cooked food scraps? I only add dirt & worms to it now.
Doug says that we don't generally recommend composting animal feces because they contain ecoli and unless you can guarantee a very hot composting process, your finished compost may very well contain this material. Plus there are other parasites and problems in cat and dog feces we want to avoid.
Getting any compost to work faster means balancing the carbon to nitrogen ratios at the proper level. Get them right - and it will work as fast as nature allows. Get them wrong and the compost will be slower. So - work on identifying and getting that carbon to nitrogen (brown to green) ratio right.
And this advice is the same for cooked versus non-cooked foods. Get that green:brown ratio right and what you put in is irrelevant for the most part.
Garden soil is fine to add to compost. It's going to provide a full range of bacteria and fungus that the process uses. It's much cheaper and as effective as any commercial product.
Worms - adding them simply kills them if you have a proper compost bed working at temperature. Otherwise, they'll go to the bottom of the bin and down into the soil if the bin is on the ground. Or, you're worm composting if the bin is off the ground and into an entirely different set of issues.
Get the carbon to nitrogen ratio right. And get rid of the feces.
