what's the weirdest thing you have composted?

a question for David, but everyone could join in.

hm... nothing particularly weird... roadkill, plywood, lots and lots of conifer branches- stuff that's hard to compost, but it gets there eventually!

A woolen mattress and a phone book.

A large road kill deer.
In my kids mums compost bin. (So my ex)
Without her knowledge.
At night.

I felt like a murderer disposing of a body.

The sea of flies covering her lawn the next day was incredible.

She never found out!

A human placenta.

Don't ask.

lol, great list.

I've composted old natural fibre clothing, which works fine except the thread sometimes doesn't break down, which is annoying. Elastic didn't break down that well either. If I was doing it again I'd probably do it in a dedicated compost where I knew I had to deal with the threads all in one go.

Roadkill
Pig skulls
Clothes
A porcupine
Drywall and plaster

One of my chickens was hit by a car and killed a couple years ago. I happened to have a 3 day-old hot pile just getting up to temp so it seemed only fair to add the chicken to it. I put the chicken in the middle of the steaming pile. She was gone in three days...Nothing left. There's something pretty awesome about composting.

@Craig

"One of my chickens was hit by a car and killed a couple years ago. I happened to have a 3 day-old hot pile just getting up to temp so it seemed only fair to add the chicken to it. I put the chicken in the middle of the steaming pile. She was gone in three days...Nothing left. There's something pretty awesome about composting."

When I had a regular humanure composting system going at a previous house, I was utterly amazed by the rapid decomposition that took place. It was a carcass-eating machine. It really is awesome.

A once-beautiful Persian carpet which sadly my tenants left out in the garden. Beyond repair so I used it as mulch and now it's disappeared into the soil.

I've composted a hen too... She gave a good boost to my hot pile.


IIRC, Geoff Lawton has composted a penguin and an armadillo

knickers I had to buy big ones when I was pregnant and there's not much you can do with a load of old knickers.

A friend's old tax papers and other personal documents which he didn't need to store anymore, and didn't want to pay to have shredded.

I once had a pig drown in one of our ponds...put it in our huge compost pile. The heat cooked it and the proteins broke down real fast. that part of the compost got really really hot. Did not smell anymore after about a week.

I know a guy who composted a dead cow in a manure pile.

Tyler Ludens wrote:A friend's old tax papers and other personal documents which he didn't need to store anymore, and didn't want to pay to have shredded.

How did you put the papers in? flat or scrunche up a bit? Did you soak them? I've been wondering how to process medium amounts of A4 sized used paper.

A few troublesome possums and a couple of duck carcasses.
Only thing remaining is the duck bill.

Apparently my compostables are not so weird anymore. A recently deceased hen, the other one just kept watching me from behind the ferns and ran away from me for a couple days. No longer usable socks and cotton underwear and other clothing pieces. A chipmunk. As for documents that have personal information, I tear the personal part off and tear that into small unreadable pieces. They help feed the worms, or get mixed with soil and coffee grounds, etc and into the compost. This is good winter activity while watching online documentaries or listening to pauls podcasts. Turning the sand and rocks into food and pollinator habitat one compostable at a time.

Puppies

Erica Daly wrote:Apparently my compostables are not so weird anymore. A recently deceased hen, the other one just kept watching me from behind the ferns and ran away from me for a couple days. No longer usable socks and cotton underwear and other clothing pieces. A chipmunk. As for documents that have personal information, I tear the personal part off and tear that into small unreadable pieces. They help feed the worms, or get mixed with soil and coffee grounds, etc and into the compost. This is good winter activity while watching online documentaries or listening to pauls podcasts. Turning the sand and rocks into food and pollinator habitat one compostable at a time.

I do the same with personal documents. Shredded and thrown worm bin. Works great and I can't think of a more secure way to dispose of them lol.

I've had little luck with my attempts at conventional compost piles. Shame as I get a decent amount of roadkill around my house for some reason

Had a friend who was working hard at composting disposable nappies (diapers). Apparently there are feminine products designed for composting, but not so much with the baby ones, at least at that time and place.

After walking my dog Smiling Jack around the park I would compost those compostable scooper bags. After a year in the mound they sure looked like pooper scooper bags. BUT, what was in them was gone! To be fair, they did break down eventually. But we were definitely garden -raking the shreds. And then finally, at the end of his lovely life I mournfully laid Jack in a cotton blanket in a bed of sawdust on the edge of the garden where his body won't be disturbed by so many kitchen peelings.

From what I can tell, plastics fall into two broad categories. Those that will truly biodegrade (made from corn etc), and those that will degrade to invsible to the human eye because they break down into micro pieces of plastic i.e. the plastic is still there. I'd guess that disposable nappies and menstrual pads fall into the latter category. I've seen dog poo bags made from cornstarch but I'm guessing most aren't.

Bones;
Not so much weird but difficult. I use live oak leaves and molasses to do this. Live oak leaves develop a high amount of tannic acid during decomposition. These high acid levels help break down the bones and the molasses keeps the heap hot by supplying sugar as a food source to the bacteria.

@ Erica
Yes I remember when my kids were babies going to some effort to find fully bio degradable nappies but couldn't find any on the market. I occasionally check to see if you can get them now but it seems not. You'd think that they would be a popular product.
When I'm in charge I'd pass a law to say they have to be fully bio degradable.

some stock ponds on a ranch was over populated with mud cats/ pollywogs/ mud catfish. If you ever tried eating one, it is like eating mud. I set my fish traps out and caught 347 of them and composted every one of them. Needless to say, it was an exponentially productive time the following year in the gardens. On our beaches, we have tons and tons of Sargasso Seaweed wash up. On one of the numerous trips, I loaded up the extended bed of my 1 ton truck with the stuff and brought back with me. I washed it down to get the heavy salt off and made a separate compost heap out of it with wood chips and it is something that I would do again.

Kenneth Thompson wrote:Bones;
Not so much weird but difficult. I use live oak leaves and molasses to do this. Live oak leaves develop a high amount of tannic acid during decomposition. These high acid levels help break down the bones and the molasses keeps the heap hot by supplying sugar as a food source to the bacteria.

This year I tried composting large bones in rabbit manure, urine and straw. I even tossed in a marrow bone (1/2" wall thickness and a foot long) that my dog was done with. Once the pile was hot I tossed in the bones and turned it every other day. After three weeks all of the bones were soft enough to smush by hand. They were almost like putty.

Rose Pinder wrote:

Tyler Ludens wrote:A friend's old tax papers and other personal documents which he didn't need to store anymore, and didn't want to pay to have shredded.

How did you put the papers in? flat or scrunche up a bit? Did you soak them? I've been wondering how to process medium amounts of A4 sized used paper.

I only ever sheet compost, instead of making heaps, so they were the bottom layer of a bed of various materials.

Rose Pinder wrote:

I've composted old natural fibre clothing, which works fine except the thread sometimes doesn't break down, which is annoying. Elastic didn't break down that well either. If I was doing it again I'd probably do it in a dedicated compost where I knew I had to deal with the threads all in one go.

The same for me, all my old fashion clothes, that then became work clothes, that then became rags, that then got composted. Lots of elastic! I would put the pitch fork in a lift and find 30 or 40 elastic strings pulling from the pile.

Fully biodegradable diapers/nappies? The old fashioned kind, all cotton. After the kids are all potty trained, they are the best towels, wipers, rags ever! Compost like the good cellulose they are.
Thekla

This past May my freezer broke and all the food defrosted and started to spoil so I threw all the contents into the compost pile. This included several pounds of hot dogs and hamburgers, TV dinners, whole ham, chicken thighs, several loaves of bread, and frozen veggies. After a month there was nothing left but the wax paper covering the hamburgers. In the past I have composted a roadkill deer, fox, sparrow, and mouse. I have also composted a whole sheet cake with strawberry filling and a couple of 100% cotton shirts.

Halloween candy.

Old socks that get too dirty to use as dust socks, a few hundred voters guides, all the pets and humans hair, dryer lint and vacuumed stuff, most of my urine, dead birds. Not really the weirdest but not as common.

Brewing lees (yeast) really fired up my compost temperature.

Timothy Norton wrote:Brewing lees (yeast) really fired up my compost temperature.

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?

I'm just worried it will turn into the Stay-Puffed Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters!

My first inclination would be to mix it with water, small lumps ok… then pour it over or into the compost and turn the pile enough to mix it in.

Flourish high in carbon, maybe add some nitrogen to the water?  Urea, uric acid, urine?

Or pour the flour onto alfalfa or alfalfa pellets?

Can’t wait to hear others’ ideas.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote: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?

This happened to me a few years ago, part of a bag of flour somehow went moldy. It was summer so actually sprinked it around the yard to combat flea beetles, just like I would do ashes or diatomaceous earth. (stacking functions). If it were going into compost, I think I also would mix it with water- you have to water your compost anyway.

André Troylilas wrote:A woolen mattress and a phone book.

I tried composting some outdated volumes of Arizona Revised Statutes. I ended up deciding they'd make better bricks than compost.

I have composted several horses. Before then I had a neighbor with a backhoe for burials (I used to be a horse breeder, these horses had been kept as pets until they died of old age or misadventure). The backhoe broke down but that neighbor had a tractor and he used that from then on to dig a hole about 3' deep with it. So a carcass would be put in the ground and the tractor guy moved bucketful after bucketful of manure and old hay to mound up over the body, I'd say about 4-5 feet above the ground. I did block off the area with temporary fencing to discourage any digging, but I never smelled anything. Eventually as the body composts the pile sinks down, and while I have not checked I am sure that all that's left now is the largest bones.