Today I decided to turn the compost heap which has been covered for a couple of months. There was a hole in the centre which I sincerely hope was made by a very fat mouse. The peg will give some idea of scale.No other evidence of rodent activity but I persuaded Spouse to dig the hole out just in case there was anyone 'at home'.
10 comments:
Hmm... I had wondered about that when I saw your exposed heap, but didn't want to say anything at the time...
I hoped you just were lucky.
Hi Wildside,
The compost is in 3 bins with wooden sides. We fill one while the others are composting or being used. We tend to turn them twice a year and this time I added some of the horse manure we had.
Hi Frankie,
We regularly get rats around the signalbox.When I'm on nights you can hear them under the box having a party. The pest control bloke has not long been and now a disgusting smell keeps appearing, one of the other signallers says it's nothing to do with him....mmm
Cheers mark
Could also be a frog or toad -- I get quite a few of them overwintering in the warmth of the compost heap, only to get rudely disturbed by me preparing Spring beds!
Please let it be a frog or a toad...
Hi again, Frankie! Just wanted to come back and let you know I did read your reply too.
In my opinion, the opening looks a bit too small to be a rat, but they have the uncanny ability to morph themselves through many an unlikely crevice, so jury still out on that!
I'd love to do the compost piles as you do, I think it the best and the easiest, but with the rat problem we have (and living in town) people are strongly encouraged to keep their composting confined to containers, so I've created several garbage can wormeries -- but have also broken a drill bit or two doing so. And lugging and relugging the results all over the place gets a bit tedious and the back and shoulders complain. (Wimps!)
At some point I may just throw all caution to the wind and go ahead and do it your way though! The rats have already proven they are here to stay and so we just have to keep up on our campaign to zap 'em.
Still, rats give me the heebie jeebies.
Am now paranoid about Weil's Disease but I don't mind the odd rat, I just wouldn't want a family of them moving in.
I've had rats in my heap and their hole was much bigger than yours. I ended up having to move the whole heap into another bin and evict them. I tried all kinds of things to shift them first (using Garden Organics helpful website), but in the end only hard graft was effective. I've now put sheets of galvanised zinc wire under each bin (and I have 8 of them!) to keep them out. It's worked for the past 3 years...
we have a little field mouse in our compost... Tom usually bashes the side of the bin before he opens and turns as he'd rather not spear anything. the rats are under the old outhouse me thinks.... much bigger hole! living on farmland with horses and horse feed etc next door apparently the rats are inevitable, in 9 months i've only actually seen one of them. it's the moles that leave around 5 molehills a day that bother me most, although luckily they still haven't made it to the allotment patch.
Thanks Both, I will put some chicken wire at the base of the heaps.
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