what's the weirdest thing you have composted?

I would mix the flour into a new garden bed. Oftentimes I use bits of flour as a soil probiotic and it tends to work in my experience. My thought is that the starch should give some sugars to digest when there are no plant root exudates yet.

Fingernail cuttings are odd I suppose, to give one? I have yet to compost anything particularly weird.

I'm not sure burying a dead animal counts as "composting", but if it does, the weirdest thing I ever had to bury was an owl. I woke up one morning to find a dead owl stuck in the barbed wire runs across the top of the cattle fencing.
I've put lots of dead animals in my compost bin though, snakes, mice, birds of many flavors, etc.
All the food waste in our house including bones, fat, and skin
It all goes in the compost bin.
Sounds like words to a country song.....

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:
Interesting -- and apropos. I have a 10-lb. bag of unbleached white flour that was chewed up by the hound, trash-binned by the house sitter, and retrieved by me (it's organic material dude!). And now it needs to go into the compost bins. Sprinkled slowly or one big blob?

Rather less than 10-lb of flour - a few ounces I'd spilt on the (not too clean) kitchen floor. Daughter had asked for some pastry for a calorimeter test at school, so this was an ideal candidate, a few specks of dirt (I'm UK, so dirt isn't garden soil) wouldn't make a significant difference. But there was more pastry than needed for the test, so it got shared out, eaten and much enjoyed. Can dirt be that tasty?
Sorry, that avoided the compost.

My dad had an old unsprung mattress, many decades ago, he buried in a flower bed in spring before planting it up with annuals.
The flowers were growing nicely, so too were yellow strands twining up the stems, sucking their sap. He was on his knees pulling them off his plants.
The mattress must have been filled with flax, complete with seeds of flax dodder, long dormant.

Joshua States wrote:I'm not sure burying a dead animal counts as "composting", but if it does, the weirdest thing I ever had to bury was an owl. I woke up one morning to find a dead owl stuck in the barbed wire runs across the top of the cattle fencing.
I've put lots of dead animals in my compost bin though, snakes, mice, birds of many flavors, etc.
All the food waste in our house including bones, fat, and skin
It all goes in the compost bin.
Sounds like words to a country song.....

Burying (digging a deep hole and backfilling with dirt) isn't composting, but you can compost critters using hay and manure.  https://www.ndsu.edu/agriculture/extension/publications/4-easy-steps-composting-dead-livestock

I helped start composting at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Compost/trash/recycling where it was once just trash/recycling.  The festival has 10,000 people attend each day for four days! A few years after I started (first with just the food vendors), the festival used compostable plastic cups. The whole process from training volunteers (who tried to train festival goers) to getting it all back to our farm and making compost out of it was quite a learning experience.

Kris Holstrom wrote:I helped start composting at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Compost/trash/recycling where it was once just trash/recycling.  The festival has 10,000 people attend each day for four days! A few years after I started (first with just the food vendors), the festival used compostable plastic cups. The whole process from training volunteers (who tried to train festival goers) to getting it all back to our farm and making compost out of it was quite a learning experience.

Smaller gatherings of eco-campaigners aim to collect theit excrement, directly dropped into wheelie bins, and trucked off to a nearby farm.
While researching, I did an internet search for 'mobile sewage'. Results unhelpful, but I did learn of a few people reporting visiting sewage treatment works. Peering over the wall at smelly, dark waters, mobile phones dropped out of breast pockets!

100 pound beloved LGD “Rags”, after she died.  Also two or three 8-12 week old lambs who died.

It was a few years ago.  I had begun saying I would rather be composted than embalmed or cremated.  Both seem too wasteful of resources, and wasteful of the compounds that comprise my body.  And I would love to become part of the soil after this human adventure/fiasco🤣.a

The lambs died and it seemed like a good opportunity to see if I really could compost an intact carcass.

I made a square bin out of 4 pallets.  I put 18-24 inches of used bedding straw, then put a carcass in, then more ,straw and then the second carcass.  I added fungal inoculants, compost starter such as happy frog soil conditioner, I probably poured in whey and maybe some urine.

I had made all this in a shaded spot.  I watered it, then threw a couple layers of cotton canvas over it and left it.  If I knew a rain was coming, I might pull back the canvas to allow the moisture in, but if I weren’t around, the canvas made a sort of hollow, and the liquid water would collect there and seep down.

I left it there from April until I left for the winter.  Throughout that period, I lived next to it, walked past it several times a day.  I never smelled it, nothing ever disturbed it.

The following year, I broke the pile down, there were no bones or hooves or wool, just sweet smelling compost.

A few years later when my dog died of old age, I knew it would work, and I went ahead with the same procedure.  I had to leave that wonderful place, and when I did, I took my dog’s compost with me.  It enriches the soil of my current place.

I consider it just one more way she loved and protected me and kept me company every way possible.

But, I will admit it may seem weird.

This morning I found five chipmunks at the bottom of a bucket of water.
They got a decent burial in the compost bin.

[quote=Thekla McDaniels]A few years later when my dog died of old age, I knew it would work, and I went ahead with the same procedure.  I had to leave that wonderful place, and when I did, I took my dog’s compost with me.  It enriches the soil of my current place.
I consider it just one more way she loved and protected me and kept me company every way possible.
But, I will admit it may seem weird.[/quote]

Oh, that doesn't seem weird at all! I love the idea of "enriched-through-love" compost!

I collect information like a squirrel collecting acorns (and generally my ability to find it again is on that same level...). But this thread is very helpful. Last night my dog jumped onto my roof to get a cat that was up there taunting him (lots of feral cats where I live), and now I have a cat to get rid of. I don't have a super hot pile but I know how to make one. Was considering putting it through the bokashi cycle (a month or so fermenting and then a month in the finishing barrel), I've done it with good-sized rats before and they vanish without a trace, but never anything larger.

I have sort of lost track of time and came back to find out when I posted...I am AMAZED to find this post was only two weeks ago.

I put the cat in my bokashi finishing barrel (not the actual bokashi, but the next step, where the bokashi matures into compost). It is a covered trash barrel with holes drilled in, where I layer the "pickled" bokashi with rabbit bedding and dirt. Usually I leave it a month or so, turning it maybe once or twice, and out comes gorgeous compost.
This time, I decided to make it hotter than usual because of the animal- I put in some spoiled alfalfa, the rabbit bedding including urine-soaked coffee grounds (which usually just goes straight into the garden). It was dry for these two weeks so I watered it once or twice as well.
Yesterday I noticed there were mushrooms growing out of the barrel's drilled holes! I went in there to mix around a bit and found a mostly intact cat, minus its hair, and no smell whatsoever. The barrel is out there steaming right now (freezing rain, the temp has fallen drastically in the last 12 hours).

When I lived in the forest I composted all the deer & wild pig bones, hides, & innards from the "bone pit" the "gut bucket" was dumped into. Hundreds of deer & pig remains after they were dressed out. Used the excavator a few times to get them out & haul them to the garden area.

The weirdest thing I've ever composted though was a waterbed frame. It wasn't intentionally composted per se but I knew it would eventually decompose. I used it to compost other things in. Over the years I added soil to the outside edges & eventually the whole thing disappeared. It was just gone.

A roadkill racoon

The story started when my daughter started asking questions about composting and animals in general, at the time we were living out of town in the Santa Cruz mountains, CA. I had a three bin compost pile next to her fort, so she was able to keep track of things and in this case the disintegration of the racoon. When she informed me that there didn't seem to be anything left, we decide to explore, which became a careful dig looking for remnants. Since this was late at night, the dig took place using a flashlight. Her little hands (she had just started grammar school) soon found some bones and teeth from the skull. Rodents, I guess, had done a good job of messing up the carcass, but she found most of it, including most of the teeth. The next say we assembled the skeleton; she apparently didn't need much help in figuring out the proper arrangement. Well. this and other composting experiences became many learning experiences, especially available to kids growing up in the country.  She eventually used this story as an early indication of her interest in biology and used it in application to UC Berkely; she got accepted and graduated with a double degree, one of which was Integrated Biology.

Jacques

Seventeen dead sheep. Worst day of farming in my life.

I put the sheep on succulent pasture too soon and they got bloat and 17 died. All were composted, but that was 20 years ago and I still feel bad about it.

Today, I could have saved every one of them via emergency veterinary knowledge. I had no idea what to do at the time and watched them all die slowly.

This is crazy that this is a 10 year old thread still going

Recently had a client we started smelling something that was dead and couldn't find it

After much searching, I found a dead deer underneath some shrubs., in it already been there for a while, and it just wasn't gonna be worth extracting the remains. So I built a big compost pile on top of it. A bunch of leaves and weeds and some stuff from the kitchen and some mulch.

By the end of the summer, it had been completely digested by the pile

And my client never had to find out about it

A possum was terrorizing my pile- Those big Virginia Opossums are not native to Oregon, but the Arkies (dust bowl days) supposedly brought some along for a familiar treat during the dust bowl migrations. (I dunno: wasn't around then.) So: possum ransacking the pile, making a mess! Possum turds are Gnarlygross! So: I made a nice possum-sized nest in the top of the pile under the rain cover, and added some cheap peanut butter. The next day as noon approached I took my Allen hoe and filed it sharp as a  hatchet. I took the hoe and using  the projection on the back of the hoe blade, I quick as a wink pulled the plastic cover off and hollered "LANDLORD! RENT'S DUE!" and at the speed of a sewing machine shredded the possum into the compost, and added some autumn leaves from the pile to cover. The thermometer registered good heat for some days after that.