Composting cooked foods in a dalek ?

[jackarmy]

Ok, so spent the last two days trawling ( not trolling ) thinternet ( here mostly ) for info on composting cooked foods in a dalek.
The main advice i see is not too, the reason given being it attracts vermin but surely that cant be the only reason ? , surely we can protect our daleks, chicken wire etc , ? surely cooked foods are compostable in a dalek.

Anyway, the only people ive found so far who admit to throwing ( wrapped in paper ) cooked foods into the pointed ones are Two Sheds and i think it was Penelope or Alison, cant remeber ive read so much.

Anyway, anyone else out there compost your old curry and bread in a dalek ?, im going too. No meat or bones for me but everything else......

[Penellype]

I don't have a dalek, I have a hotbin. I compost all my food waste in it, but it runs at 40-60C and is supposed to be vermin proof. I'd be concerned about cold composting cooked food like bread, as it could well attract mice and rats. According to the pest control officer who came to see if I had a mouse in my kitchen earlier this year, if you can fit a ball point pen through a gap, a mouse can get in.

[fishpond]

I have weld mesh under 2 of my bins, that keeps the vermin out, but I do not put meat in them as I feel it may contaminate the ground during the composting process and when spread on the veg plot some time later, if it hasn,t been blown by flies and eaten whilst in the bin.
The perfect solution is to keep a pig---and grow your own sausages.

[Baldy]

If you can get it really hot then maybe - my bins are mostly not looked after enough to get the heat - a determined rat can chew through most barriers if they smell the urge...
https://www.earthkind.com/blog/what-...-chew-through/

(its on the internet so must be true )

[burnie]

First question to me is why would you want to introduce potential bad bacteria into your growing medium, you just might create a whole lot of health problems for very little in return, asking for trouble would be my thoughts.

[Potstubsdustbins]

Two Sheds was a bit special when it came to composting she had it down to a fine art and if I remember correctly had 3/4 different compost heaps/methods.

I have two daleks but have never been able to get them hot enough to be successful with anything other than garden waste.

[mothhawk]

I suppose the big question is how much and how often, and of course, why do you have food waste in the first place?

You should certainly never have bread to throw away. Stale bread can be whizzed or rubbed to crumbs and either dried out or frozen to use for stuffings or coatings or pudding toppings. Or made into bread and butter pudding or summer pudding. If it's sliced bread you buy, keep it in the freezer and just take out as many slices as you want each day, it thaws pretty fast.
Or, like me, make your own bread. I find H/M bread is never around long enough to go stale or mouldy

[mothhawk]

If you do intend putting cooked food into your dalek, then if you don't already have some, find some leopard slugs (the enormous orangey or greyish ones with dark speckles) and put them in as well. They will happily munch through cooked food, raw bones if they are fine, or broken up and crushed, and also any other species of slugs they come across. They are the ones that scoff cat food left out for hedgehogs and are really not at all fussy eaters, but happily not so keen on green, living plants.

[Jay-ell]

I bokashi food waste including meat trimmings, dairy, eggs, fish, etc. before I put in in the bin. So far the bins haven't attracted vermin after 3 years despite the site having rats and mice. They generally don't get hot enough to process raw meat straight away but after it's been pickled in the bokashi it seems to compost just fine.

[Cadalot]

Examples from our allotment of how the rats are eating their way into the composting daleks and a rat run and access formed under a shed.



You can clearly see the rat run forming in the grass path and the hollow they have made to make access under the shed easy

It should be noted that the bins hit were people that try and compost cooked food, we were also advised to try and locate the Daleks in the middle of the plot and away from edges, like walls and raised beds as rats like to hug edges when they scurry around for security as they only have to monitor one side for predators.

In another note a housing estate moved the wc from inside to a prefab lifted onto the back of the properties in the late 60s / 70s which included a bathroom and the original wc was turned into an airing cupboard as it housed the water tank. The old sewer popes were not capped particularly well and rats would find there way into the floor void and nest below the warm water tank and sometimes gain access into the properties.

The solution was lifting the floorboards and sealing the outlet with a concrete made with glass fragments as it tear the faces of the rats and put them off chewing through the concrete bung. Not a good idea for the base of a Dalek

[Yasai]

There were rats running up and down the garden last year, having a merry ole time. Turns out they were nesting in the compost bins in our next door neighbour's garden. Consequently, I didn't do much gardening at all last year and any ideas I had about getting a compost bin have gone completely out the window. It's no fun sharing your gardening space with rats so, personally, I wouldn't do anything that is likely to increase your chances of ending up with them.

[veggiechicken]

I "compost" any food waste through the dogs and chooks. Between them, they can deal with almost anything!
I wouldn't put rotting meat in a bin in case of maggots - which give me the eebiejeebies

[jackarmy]

Ok so the general concensus was TS was the only one lol .
I dont get a lot of cooked food waste as like you VC the dogs usually finish it off, it just seemed a waste not to try to compost the rest.
Nevermind though, as i totally respect the knowladge of you fellahs ( and fellettes of course ) the rest will carry on going to landfill.

Oh and Mothawk, you like your bread lol, but man, i hate Band B pudding , havent had it since school.

[ESBkevin]

You can always start a worm farm. Or dig a trench and bury the cooked food immediatly. But Cadalot nails it for me, don't encourage the little beggers!

[BUFFS]

except for bones, which our council composts, we very rarely have any cooked food waste, we were not brought up to waste food, you cook what you can eat, and you eat what you have cooked, virtually no waste, so the council biodegradable bags last for ages before going into the green waste bin that gets collected each week, we may be one of britains poorest areas but the council is one of the uk's top when it comes to recycling..