Green Johanna?

[1Bee]

Our local council is offering Green cones for £15 and Green Johanna for £20.

We have a fair bit of food waste, to my shame, as both boys sometimes have difficult relationships with eating. So something I could use for food waste would be great. But what about rats...?

[bikermike]

https://www.greatgreensystems.com/sh...aste-digesters
Is it one of those?

that's one heck of a discount by your council. Wish my council did stuff like that.

What about rats? you could probably put them in too. Best make sure they are dead first...

Would you put it on your plot or by your house?

If it's secure enough and gets hot enough quickly enough, I doubt the rats will go for it, but it's those "enough" that are the issue.

Until our council fecked it up again, we had food waste collections for stuff I wouldn't cold compost. We only filled our small caddy (7l?) more than once in a week about three times in the 3 + years we had them. That's with 2 adults and toddler. We'd probably fill the cold compost bucket (similar size) two or three times a week. I did wonder about buying a hot composter, but at full price they are expensive for not a lot of volume gain.

In terms of keeping food waste on one side, the plastic lidded caddy has only occasionally smelled bad (the bin with food waste in smells worse).

What about maintenance? do you need to put sawdust in it with every load? where are you going to get that from? store it etc?


After all that rambling, I would say *if* you generate enough cooked food waste to get a bigger volume of composting, and *if* you can find a location to keep the bin and ship waste to it, and *if* you can do all that in accordance with the operating rules, then it will be worth doing, and shouldn't attract rats if it's running properly hot.

[nickdub]

I compost my food waste - to get round the rat problem I use a blue barrel which I drilled some holes in the bottle of then mounted on a stand by poking a long bar horizontally through the center about half way down ( I heated up the end of the metal rod first with a blow-torch, so I could just push it through the plastic wall of the barrel) - been using it for more than 5 years and never had a rat problem with it.

[bikermike]

is that all food waste?
does it get hot enough?
Do you need to put anything else in it?

I am very interested as I'd love to compost the food waste if I could find an acceptable way of doing it.

[bikermike]

Composting Food - www.carryoncomposting.com
link that may of interest, a comparator of different ones.

They seem to suggest you need 1/3rd Garden waste.

[nickdub]

is that all food waste?
does it get hot enough?
Do you need to put anything else in it?

I am very interested as I'd love to compost the food waste if I could find an acceptable way of doing it.

I do put in other stuff on an ad hoc basis but mostly its just food waste - everything organic will compost down eventually - its a matter of how long you are able to leave it, and with this in mind I now have two bins of the sort described, I extended the aluminum stand I made for the first one to add the second.

[SarrissUK]

Wow, what an excellent price! My council does the green Johannas for £120 Would you buy me one and I'll come collect it? haha

[1Bee]

Sorry, Sarissa, it's one per household!

Thanks everyone. Yes, it's a very good price. I'll put it on the allotment, and I might add some wire mesh to the base as extra rat protection... I hate throwing away food, so it would be good to know I'm making compost with it.

Like you, Biker, we fill our ordinary compost bucket several times a week, and I toddle off down the allotment with it. As long as I can find a suitable caddy with a reasonably secure lid, I can do the same with food waste.

[SelkirkAlex]

I would bite their arm off, total bargain. I add general kitchen scraps and have a paper shredder so always have shredded paper to hand plenty of people make suitable caddies, mine is by addis ,also consider the bio degradable caddy liners, basically handy "plastic" bags to take to the composter and just toss bag and all in.

I have had to add the winter warming jacket to mine so I would ask your council about that as they are expensive normally