British Columbia: compost,infestation,organic,matter,meat,smell,

"Heeeelp". To make long story short. Here in Vancouver BC I cook for near a year our own home made cat food. Content liver, chicken hearts, minced tureky and beef with minced rice salt and a bit of oil. All to cure a stomach ailment of one of our cats that worked well. I kept the cans washed and cleaend from previous shop foods. Nothing else in it. This time 60 cans (for one month) something went wrong, terribly wrong. At the end after packing the 9 liters of food and freezing it, a bad smell started when I used the first cans. The test with the cats showed they would not touch it. What to do with the 17th century movie prison like sludge?
Afraid to put it in the trash, that's only picked up every two weeks, thinking it maybe be good for the compost instead of down the toilet, it being food, I put it in our composter that gets morning to noon sun.
"A HUGE MISTAKE" it seems.
Since then the black plastic city composter has become the home of hundreds of flies, wasps and thousands of what looks like small white maggots. The smell is, well I guess rotten meat and close to unbearable ten meters around! To make it worse, it's at the end of our veggie patch and one floor under the kitchen window and just steps from our neighbour garden.
Since then, I have added several buckets of clean soil on to cover it all up, and I have soacked it with cold water several times. But to no avail it seems to be nearly like boiling of pests.
What to do? Please help the composter is way to heavy filled now end of summer to move it. Empty it and throw where seems and impossible smelly option and if I burry it in the garden maybe it will become an all over smelly patch.
How to kill the smell?

 

Hello,

Could you maybe get one of those Costco yard trimming bags (they're the big ones) and shovel it there and you can put it in your green bin to be picked off every week. It's basically organic waste. You might also want to add newspaper in there to soak up the liquid. You can maybe put it multiple bags just so that it won't be too heavy.

Just a thought.

 

Just let it be. The wasp and maggot problem will sort itself out as soon as the warm weather is finished and the smell will go away (this weekend should do it). Don't forget that birds like crows and starlings adore maggots -- it's like bird candy. You've done the right thing by putting clean soil on top, and as long as the composter is covered so raccoons can't get into it, it'll be fine. If you can mix the soil into the stinky stuff somehow, it'll go faster, because the soil microorganisms will help break it down. But in future, try to keep meats out of your composter. It really isn't meant to break them down, and they'd be better in the green bin.

 

Maybe a few cups of lime would help, it's sometimes used in outhouses for bad odours.

 

Burying the smelly mess in the garden will rid your yard of odours and provide lots of nitrogenous fertilizer for future crops. I dump all of my kitchen scraps (including meat and bones) into a 5 gallon pail with a tight lid kept on the back deck. When this is full, by which time it is very smelly and sometimes loaded with maggots, I bury the contents about a foot deep in my backyard garden. While the waste is exposed, it attracts hundreds of flies and smells awful; but, as soon as it is buried, the smell goes away, along with the flies. Occasionally, raccoons will dig down to investigate; but they are easily deterred by placing pieces of old chicken wire mesh above the buried waste. I've planted tomatoes and other crops right on top of such material and had extremely good results; so you don't have to wait a long time to use the burial area for plants.

 

wow, that's a big commitment to your fav felines! now where are they when you need them to help in the garden! Seriously - I think you are lucky it's this time of year when the cool weather is arriving.

what do your neighbours think? I'd be unhappy neighbour if I had to smell that mess of decomposition! (assuming it's wafting over the fence)

rats? and raccoons, coyotes - etc. - is that an issue?

I'm sure you had good intentions (and happy cats!) - I'm surprised that you're permitted to put cooked or meat type food in the compost in your n'hood.

I think you have done the right thing with the soil --- make sure it's light breathable soil.

stir it up (there are aerator devices that move the composting matter around in the bin --- aeration and the right amount of moisture is key (along with the right mix of matter)

as a summer cabin survivor - the lime story - I don't know - it still has a distinct sinus-clearing odour

do let us know how this turns out - you might be originating the future of waste matter disposal in a better way than trucking it to some rural locale!