Super Fast High Speed Composting UNREAL.

[Gary350]

I put a bunch of water melon rines on my compost pile RED side down. The compost was about 4 1/2 ft tall. The water melon rines made holes all the way to the bottom of the compost pile as if they had burned a hole or melted a hole all the way to the ground. I put left overs from a whole water melon on there and it pretty much ate up the 75% of the compost pile in only a few days. I turned the water melon rines over to look on the bottom side and it is covered with Black Solder Fly magets. COOL

Alright this is exactly what I have been looking for, a way to attract black solder flies. It appears I can do a years worth of composting is about a week. The maggets ate up the grass clippings I assume because they were touching the red side of the water melon. Looks like the maggets are going after the sweet part of the water melon and eat the grass clipping and other stuff in the process.

The organic material that the maggets have eaten looks like a cow pile.

I'm not 100% sure but if black solder flies like sweet then sugar water sprayed on the compost pile might be the trick to get the magets to eat the whole rest of my compost pile.

[rainbowgardener]

I'm not sure I understand. What happens when the maggots "eat the whole compost pile"? What is left after that? Is this just a way of getting rid of stuff, or do you have compost left at the end? Or a maggot version of worm castings?

[cynthia_h]

More information on BSF larvae and composting than *I* ever wanted to know:

https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9672

Includes calculations of waste matter useable compost and expected time frame(s)

Cynthia H.
Sunset Zone 17, USDA Zone 9

[rainbowgardener]

Thanks cynthia. I had actually seen that before, but it still left me a little unclear why people do this. This is the part from that thread that made sense to me:

'The Title of this thread was a bit confusing though.. composting isn't the same as feeding maggots. In a compost pile you wouldn't have any maggots at all.

But, now after reading the article I can see that it wasn't about composting at all it was about disposing non-compostable items by feeding em to the black soldier fly larvae.. and then using the feces from the maggots as a soil amendment. "

Elsewhere in the thread it talks about reducing 100 lbs of kitchen scraps to 5 lbs of soil amendments. I guess that's great if you are a restaurant with 100 lbs of kitchen scraps a day to get rid of. My two person household, we maybe make 5lbs of kitchen scraps in a good week and that is composting EVERYTHING, including coffee filters, paper towels, etc. So that would get reduced down to less than an ounce of soil amendment. ... The "soil amendment" (I.e. COMPOST) is what I'm doing all this for. I don't want it reduced to nothing!

I will stick to regular composting! Leave the maggots for the people who want to digest their kitty poo into something useful.

[!potatoes!]

'Leave the maggots for the people who want to digest their kitty poo into something useful.'

or have a bunch of chickens to feed....