I love the idea of guerilla composting! I have some additional thoughts and experience that might give you more ideas.
Tl;dr: the burying or mulching helps kitchen scraps be slightly less of a critter attractant, and definitely less of a litter appearance to humans. Please be mindful of what effect the scraps might be having on wildlife patterns.
I've done a lot of Ruth Stout composting - which is burying your scraps under a deep mulch right in the garden. In Montana, we had copious straw, hay, or sawdust to put over the top of our scraps in the garden. These mulched piles were sometimes dug into by the wild turkeys or other critters, but mostly did an amazing job of improving that sand and rock soil we had there.
When I lived in downtown Missoula, I was in an old house converted to apartments and had small garden beds in front of my porch. I didn't have hay or sawdust, plus that might offend the landlord and neighbors. So I specifically bought a bag of bark mulch for the garden beds, just so I could put my kitchen scraps underneath it and no one would be the wiser!
Now I'm on a property where my "yard" (as Americans call it) is the former goat pasture. Here, hay or leaves break down quite quickly with all the rain, and there is a lot of wildlife. So I do what is often called trench composting - I dig a shallow hole and bury my scraps. The wildlife critters (coyotes, rats, mice, racoons, opossums) frequently, but not always, dig it up.
My landlady here is fine with my compost burying, she just doesn't want raw meat scraps in the pasture. She's concerned raw meat could encourage or introduce parasites which would not be healthy for future pasture livestock.
I'm trying to improve the soil around the dripline of a neglected mulberry tree. If it weren't for that, due to the scraps attracting critters, I'd probably bury my scraps at the far corner, farther away from the buildings.
That's the thing with putting food scraps out - they could change wildlife movement patterns and/or encourage wildlife where you don't want them.
There's this story Toby Hemenway writes about in Gaia's Garden, where he had carefully planned a hedgerow with native forage on the outside for where the deer passed by, and grafted-on fruits on the inside side, for human consumption. But then his neighbor started putting apples out for the deer. So the deer changed their feeding pattern and now started grazing the INSIDE of his carefully thought out, carefully grafted hedgerow.
Pollinator Scavenger Hunt
Report a post to the moderators (1/6)
