My two compost bins are being very productive. As well as yielding their first crop of usable compost... they are also home to a heaving mass of wildlife.
My two compost bins are being very productive. As well as yielding their first crop of usable compost, now spread over back and front gardens to great effect, they are also home to a heaving mass of wildlife. Every time I open the lids a great cloud of flies emerges.
Fruit flies (at least two Drosophila species) feature strongly, which is no surprise given the amount of apple cores, banana skins, melon shells and potato peelings we chuck in each week. Although the adult flies are only 2.5mm long, they are so numerous in there that their maggots can work through several bucketloads of kitchen waste each week.
These are sometimes joined by the smaller, but more delicately fluffy 'moth flies'. I haven't tried to identify these little creatures, even though (believe it or not) I do have a monograph on them. They breed in various types of decaying organic matter and are apparently common around sewage works. I've found several different types over the years: a fuzzy golden one in a treacherously boggy wood in West Sussex; a black one in the New Forest; a grey one breeding in the overflow of the rather unsavoury bathroom basin in a student flat when I lived in Brighton; and these almost pure white ones in my current garden. They look very good against the blue of the wooden compost bins. Yes blue. They match the shed and aren't really that bright - they've weathered to a dark rustic tone.
And feeding on the fly maggots is a whole series of other insects. There's a veritable ecosystem in there. Several species of rove beetle regularly turn tail and disappear into the morass when I lift off the lids. Last week I found a shiny black domed beetle about the size and shape of a kidney bean - Hister merdarius. It's very scarce, so has no common name and being shiny, black and domed is about as easy to photograph as a black hole. Sorry there's no picture of it here.
In our previous house, over in Nunhead, I regularly used to find a small but stout grey-brown chafer-like beetle sitting on the window sills or outside the back door. Trox scaber had been attracted to the lighted windows as it flew past. It was an unusual thing to find in the garden since it is a well known denizen of owl nests in hollow trees. Here it feeds on the leftovers of the owl kills and the undigested bits in regurgitated pellets. No owl nests where we lived and my supposition was always that it was breeding in local compost bins into which residents had been tipping, contrary to the usual advice, bones and meat products.
We're pretty gung-ho with our composting habits, but I draw the line at bones. Much else goes in though and the consistency of the resulting compost gives a clue to one food item we may be need to rethink. My first foray into the bottom of the mouldering earth produced a fine harvest of rich dark soil ... full of egg shells. Oh well. They soon get broken into pieces as we mulch them in; they'll help improve the drainage.
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