Compost heap in garden without attracting vermin

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NewEdition

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I have been told if I limit the compost heap to garden cuttings, grass, leaves and veg waste only, I will not get unwanted visitors.

Is that the case?

Or will rotting food - not meat / fish - Veg only - attract mice and rats?
 
I've had all kinds of rodent problems in the past no matter how careful I was. Bread or any cooked food will attract undesirables!

Then last year I bought a Joraform composter. I haven't looked back since! You can put anything into it, even raw or cooked meat! They're expensive though. I was turning waste to compost in 6 weeks in warmer weather.

QuickCrop are the suppliers in Ireland.
 
Hi NewEdition,

I had a composter bin in the past and I was very, very strict on what went in there - only veg & fruit peelings, grass, newspaper, shredded leaves, but one morning opened the top of it to see a rat scurrying down through it. It was a cold winter, must have been eating the worms and/or the peelings. Needless to say, the bin was never used again...
 
Meat and fish shouldn't go into a composter... it doesn't compost. Just 'brown' and 'green' items in the composter.
 
NewEdition said:
So if it is limited to garden waste only, no food at all.. Will that be ok?
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Some might disagree but you'll have RATS. For whatever reason they'll be there, i've stopped composting completely now and tried everything, doing it the proper way, etc, etc, etc. Got fed up last spring and stopped. There's grandkids visiting most w'kends and that did it, I don't fancy them either.
 
Ha ha, there's a bit of truth in that too. As for cats, hate them, but neighbour has one and good for nothing unless you want to put another blanket under and over it. A good terrier goes for the rat, gets them too.
 
I've never had rodent problems. I found that non-meat food waste still attracted flies though. So nowadays I compost strictly only grass. I still get an ant problem inside the brown part of the compost but I can live with it. Food waste goes in the Panda brown bin.
 
Similar to others, I found that, even though I only ever put in green and brown waste, it still attracted rats. That Joraform is quite the price RedOnion - it would take me quite some time to justify that in terms of it paying for itself!
 
Yes, it was definitely expensive, even though I got a discount. However, I grow my own vegetables a bit, so have a use for the compost, and don't have to buy any. It's also a way of educating my children which I thought was important.

I'm not sure if it'll pay for itself, but I haven't used the brown bin since I got it. I still have the once a year run to the recycling centre when the hedge is cut.
 
There are a few factors that will determine whether you get rats or not. If there's already a large presence in the area, the additional food source will do nothing to discourage them.

If there isn't, a properly enclosed and well maintained composter shouldn't cause too many problems. During the summer, the heat generated by decomposition will keep it moist, and rats and mice don't like those conditions. Regular turning speeds up the decomposition, with the added benefit that the disturbance discourages rodents further.

During the winter, the cooler temperatures disrupt the decomposition cycle and heaps will dry out. Watering them and occasional turning should keep them infestation free.

I've had an enclosed heap in D12 for 15~ years, I've never had a problem with rats, but there is some wasteland nearby with urban foxes, so their presence may be helping there.

A wormery might be an option if you have enough food scraps and have a use for the fertiliser produced.
 
I've had a compost bin in each of the three houses I've lived in since 2006.

The first was in Dublin, D16, and I never had rats.
The second was rural east Cork. I had a dog, no cats, and regular rat visits to the compost bin.
My current house is in rural north Cork. I have the same dog and two cats. Rats were a regular problem before I got the cats. Now they are a rarity but I've taken a few simple measures to put them off entirely. I have pinned a wire mesh to the ground, underneath the compost bin, to prevent the rats from burying underground into the bin. The bin itself is also pinned to the ground.

In those 12 years what I put into the bins hasn't changed. Garden waste and vegetable waste from the kitchen, tea bags, eggshells, and that's about it. Nothing cooked and no meat/fish.
 
I live in Dublin but near a large park. Mice are occasionally a problem with the compost bin. There might occasionally be a rat, (usually coming up from the park I think), and I don't put meat or fish in the bin, but do occasionally put in cooked veg. I kinda accept that mice are to some extent just part of the natural environment, and don't get too bothered by their presence. I do have a cat, and I think this keeps a kind of natural balance you would find in nature anyway.As personally, I hate waste, if I have some leftover cooked meat, bread or a chicken carcass, I leave it out briefly during the morning and the seagulls, crows and magpies make short work of it in jig time. I know this isn't to everyone's liking, but I hate to put this stuff to landfill when it can b disposed of in a more environmentally sustainable way. I don't leave it out unsupervised, so I'm confident it isn't attracting rats or other vermin. As an aside, I know we have foxes (again, living in the park), and I suspect they aren't occasionally picking off the odd rat or two.
 
DeclanDublin said:
As personally, I hate waste, if I have some leftover cooked meat, bread or a chicken carcass, I leave it out briefly during the morning and the seagulls, crows and magpies make short work of it in jig time. I know this isn't to everyone's liking, but I hate to put this stuff to landfill when it can b disposed of in a more environmentally sustainable way. I don't leave it out unsupervised, so I'm confident it isn't attracting rats or other vermin. As an aside, I know we have foxes (again, living in the park), and I suspect they aren't occasionally picking off the odd rat or two.
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It's good that you keep an eye on things, but wouldn't food waste (i.e. brown bin) be brought for composting rather than end up in landfill?
 
odyssey06 said:
It's good that you keep an eye on things, but wouldn't food waste (i.e. brown bin) be brought for composting rather than end up in landfill?
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Cooked and raw scaps, including meats, can be put in the brown bin, but I have a salutary tale concerning this. Having placed a chicken carcass in the bin during the summer a few yrs back, flies had somehow gotten in and laid eggs on it. As the bins are only collected every two weeks, by the time collection day came around I was faced with the UTTERLY disgusting sight of maggots in the bin. I had to scrub it completely. I swore I would never do this again. Leaving meats out for birds to pick clean, and then putting any remains ( there rarely are any) into a brown paper bag and putting it in the brown bin.
 
DeclanDublin said:
But I have a salutary tale concerning this. Having placed a chicken carcass in the bin during the summer a few yrs back, flies had somehow gotten in and laid eggs on it. As the bins are only collected every two weeks, by the time collection day came around I was faced with the UTTERLY disgusting sight of maggots in the bin. I had to scrub it completely. I swore I would never do this again. Leaving meats out for birds to pick clean, and then putting any remains ( there rarely are any) into a brown paper bag and putting it in the brown bin.
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Yikes... if there was a dislike button, I would have pressed it :(
 
I've had a compost bin for 4-5 years and have never noticed any rats or mice. I only use it for garden waste, raw fruit & veg, crushed eggshells, egg cartons, tea bags.
Never anything cooked. Never grains like bread, oats, nuts, seeds, cereals.
The only issues i find are small flies in the summer which i put down to an incorrect ration of brown to green waste. It's normally when i have a lot of fruit in it.
I only ever put a couple of hand fulls of grass in, never the full lawn cuttings.
I may well have had visits from a mouse or rat and know nothing about it!
 
Don't put out any food scraps as they'll attract seagulls/magpies which ruin the estate with their white 'gifts' - on roofs, gutters, windows, cars, driveways .....
 
allencat3 said:
Don't put out any food scraps as they'll attract seagulls/magpies which ruin the estate with their white 'gifts' - on roofs, gutters, windows, cars, driveways .....
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Okay call me a tree-hugging environmentalist, but I think we need to go back to the way nature intended such ' waste' to be disposed of. As best we can, without causing undue problems. Some animals, often birds are natural scavengers, and we can take advantage of this in an environmentally sustainable way that helps the environment. I'm not proposing having a tip in the back garden, but I do feel we need to consider the very efficient way nature has of disposing of what we call waste, and what other animals eat. We seem to have gotten away from our natural, sustainable ways of interacting with the environment that our ancestors would have been very familiar with, and that are still used extensively in other parts of the world.
 
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