What's up everyone? Welcome back. This is Epic Gardening.com, the

podcast from Kevin Espiritu. I'm the founder of Epic Gardening.com. All right,

today we are talking about maggots in your compost, kind of a gross topic if you're asking me.

But it's something that happens quite a bit, especially if you're using a compost tumbler like I do.

So when I opened my compost tumbler a few days ago, I got what I thought was a nasty surprise.

A bunch of maggots in my compost.

And just the name, I mean, maggots in my compost and just the name I mean maggots do not sound like a

bug you want to be near it's kind of like cockroach it doesn't sound good they

just sound like a gross bug and to be honest they kind of also look gross that's just my person they just

my gross bug and to be honest they kind of also look gross that's just my personal opinion but the real question that we need to answer is are they bad

for our compost.

Aside from how we feel about them personally, are they bad for our compost?

Well, let's look at the causes.

Let's look at why they show up in the first place

and see if we can answer if they're bad or not.

So if you've ever gone crazy trying to swap flies in your kitchen, then you already know exactly what causes these maggots to show up in your compost.

Typically food waste. So Black Soldier Flies, B-S-Fs, their larva will absolutely devour food waste so long as they have a warm moist environment to chow down in.

Well, what's a warm moist environment with a lot of food waste?

Ding, ding, ding, ding, you your compost. If you have too many greens in

your compost and not enough browns, it would not be a surprise to see a lot of

maggots in your compost. There's another potential cause and that is when you do not mix or turn your compost pile enough and what that does is that leads to moist pockets of food waste that the maggots will flock to. So if you do want to solve this problem, what you can do is you can add more browns. Again, that'll be grass-dried grass clippings, wood chips, etc.

That will lower out the percentage of food matter

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