compost weeds?

[rdak]

Hi

Well, after a few weeks of covering my new allotment with carpets, I finally made the first dig yesterday. In my naivity, I thought the couple of days rain we've had might make things easier! Managed to single-dig a strip 2ft x 18ft in 1 hour, so reckon I have 30 more hours of digging to do!
I now have a bin-liner full of grass,dandelion roots, bits of soil and pieces of mare's tail. Am I able to compost this, or will the weeds survive?

[rdak]

[allotment_chick]

Hi - there are those who compost anything taken off the plot on the grounds that it is indigenous so they are not introducing anything by adding everything to the heap.  

Personally, I separate out pernicious weeds like couch, thistle and marestail, dry them off and burn them.  The ash then gets added to the compost heap.  I like to dream that by digging these ghastly roots out I might be making life easier for myself later on!  Any weeds of an annual nature that aren't showing signs of disease I add to the compost bin - if they have seed heads I snap these off for the bonfire!   :)

[Mrs Ava]

Yup, I am one of those compost the lot people.  My lottie heap is going to stay heaped for a good couple of years, so I kinda hope in that time everything will be dead dead dead!  However, if things start sprouting out the top, I plan to yank them out, bag 'em up and either burn them or take to our tip where there is a large garden waste section and they produce soil improver.  I plant squashes in my heap and I find that really helps break it up and get the wildlife in there to do their job!  ;D

[merv]

Sorry, got to go with AC here.

You need to attain really high high temperatures to hope to kill the pernacious.  You will NOT kill marestail.

So, I dry and burn  ;)

[gavin]

Hi rdak - I don;t have marestail (fortunately!!!!!), but I do have bindweed and ground elder.  Those three I'd kill by any means to hand - preferably a divine bolt of lightning! They deserve it! - drowning in a but of water, drying and burning, or whatever.

Anything else - into the compost heap with it, on my plot.  We have to weed all the wind-blown seed from derelict plots and land - so a few more seeds undigested in the compost heap don't make that much difference!

All best - Gavin

All best - Gavin