…that brings us up to 5. And we need them all to deal with waste from the lodges and cottage that would otherwise end up in the bin.
If you’re not familiar with this design of biodigestor, it’s basically a basket dug into the ground with a double walled cone on top to speed up decomposition. You fill them up only to ground level, unlike a compost heap. And you can add most food waste, even bones and pizza, again unlike compost.
And then you wait for it all to slowly disappear into the soil. We rotate which one is ‘open’ while the rest get to work.
No, they don’t smell.
But don’t let anyone tell you that rats won’t be a problem – they will if you don’t take action. A plastic basket sunk into the ground isn’t much deterrent to a burrowing rat. To keep the beasties out of ours we’ve wrapped the basket of the green cones themselves in chicken wire (2 layers) beore putting them in the ground. And we’re taking the top layer of soil off all around the mound where the green cones are, covering it with chicken wire and putting the earth back again.
I think we should all be dealing with food waste at home, and not putting it out at the kerbside to be trucked around the country and thrown into landfill. But the hard truth is if we’re going to do that we’ve got to plan to deal with the unwanted wildlife that attracts. That or just waste less in the first place!