Topic: Dog Poo Wormery - anyone tried one?

[manicscousers]

HI there, many thanks for your enquiry. Once the worms are actively eating the waste the smell is minimal hardly any at all. Harvesting your compost does take a while the first time around as you have to fill all 3 boxes before you can get your compost from the first box. Each box can take 2-3 months to fill, as the worms are eating away and reducing the waste by up to 80%. After the first year it will be able to cope with daily waste, you do have to start slowly in the first few months.
Hope this helps and is not too confusing.
Best regards, Graham

answer from web site seller  :)

[Baccy Man]

Baccy Man, I wondered if you knew what I have in an old bath at my allotment which fills up with rain and a great deal of foliage and hedge clippings, and therefore is "steeping", I suppose. I have recently taken to throwing weed roots into it to kill them (convulvulous, couch grass etc).

Sometimes it goes pink and smells, but is not bad at the moment. Is it beneficial for veg, or harmful? Or neither?

My intentions, as always, are to clean it out and start again with rainwater and no vegetation (I'll cover it).

The pink stuff is likely to be a kind of methylobacterium sometimes referred to as pink algae or pink slime which likes to feed on decomposing plant material it is harmless & has a fairly high nitrogen content so the water would make a good plant feed.
The unpleasant smell is because the plant material is decomposing in anaerobic conditions (without oxygen) unfortunately there is nothing you can do to prevent that if you wish to kill your perennial weeds in this way. If you want another method to kill off perrennial weeds then you could place them in a plastic bag to break down or leave them out in the sun to dry out completely before adding them to your compost heap.
If you really want to get rid of the methylobacterium you will have to disinfect the bath when you empty it but I would be inclined to leave things as they are.

There is a little more info about methylobacterium & the benefits to plant growth here:
http://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Methylobacterium#Description_and_Significance
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=18256706

[posie]

Sounds to me like you shouldn't be putting stuff in daily from that then manics  ???  Which ideally I'd like to do having two mutts that seem to just spend their life doing the doo! Are you going to get one?

[manicscousers]

think so, posie, after all, ultimately, none will go in the bin, just a bit for a while  :)

[posie]

Hmmm, think I will too. It's got to be better in the long run than landfill.