Prevent Flies in your Compost Bin

Submitted by allgreen on Tue, 04/10/2007 - 08:54

Tip of the day to prevent flies in your compost bin: wrap all your old kitchen scraps in a sheet or two of old newspaper before dropping them in your compost bin. This should keep flies from laying their eggs on the organic waste.

This follows the prinicple of mixing "green" and "brown" waste, so a really good layer of shredded paper will do the trick but not so well as wrapping old fruit and veg in newspaper.

Also keep the lid on and make sure there are no gaps into the bin.

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Comments

mike (not verified)

Fri, 10/12/2007 - 13:21

Hi. I also had the problem of a million flies in my compost bin.It got so bad that you had to hold your breath while emptying the kitchen waste bucket for fear of inhaling some of the little critters. Our town(campbell river bc) has a composting demo. I asked them for help, The solution is simple ,they told me to bury each load of kitchen waste in the bin ......... it worked . I haven't seen a fly in there since i started doing this.

Gone Green (not verified)

Sun, 10/14/2007 - 10:08

Top tip, Mike, thank you. I've also recently been preventing flies in the compost bin by burying my biodegradable waste, wrapped in old newspaper, in the centre of the compost pile and it has worked a treat.

silver surfer (not verified)

Wed, 04/01/2009 - 15:45

You say make sure there are no gaps, well, our composter was delivered by the commune (I live in France) and there are gaps on all sides. I have been using the composter for about 4 weeks and there are certainly lots of flies. Our household is small but by using the composter my other waste has been reduced by more than half so I don't want a few flies to put me off composting.
I'll try the newspaper idea but we read on line so I don't collect newsprint the way I used to.