I've been using my bokashi bin for about a year now, and although I love that you can chuck in your meat scraps, I'm just too lazy, *erhm*, busy to dig a hole and bury it. I end up chucking it in my compost bin, so I am back where I began, trying to make some decent Bunnings-esque compost. You might be able to tell from my tone that this modest goal eludes me still.

Ahh the compost bin, bane of my existence. I had to turn my compost last weekend and it was really, really gross. I think I need to get it hotter, so I've instructed the boys in the household to take a tinkle in it occasionally (Apparently this adds nitrogen to it). I'll let you know how that goes ...

But I'm frustrated, dear readers. I want to be easy to turn my kitchen scraps into a source of fertility for my garden.

I've decided that animals might be a better way to go. They eat your scraps and then they concentrate the available fertility when they poo it out. I reckon poo is preferable to putrid compost any day. As a bonus, animals may even provide unconditional love and adoration, and we could all do with a bit of that, eh? I've got some chickens, rabbits, guinea pigs and a couple of mice.

The chooks are brilliant. They eat a range of kitchen scraps, and I'd keep them just for the eggs. We have a chicken house that I bought from Deluxe Chicken Houses. The chickens sleep in there at night, but we prop the door open during the day so they can free-range. Our chickens are not cuddly by any means, but they make delightfully comforting clucking noises and they will follow me around the yard. I'm taking that as adoration - you just have to claim it where you can! The manure isn't straightforward to use though. Apparently chooks don't have a separate anus and urethra, so their poo contains the urine as well. Put fresh chook poo on your garden and the ammonia will burn your plants. You need to leave the manure somewhere to dry for six months so that the ammonia will evaporate off, and then you can sprinkle it on the garden. So you need a place to store it for the six months, which might be a bit of a pain. I've been chucking mine in the compost bin - I'm not sure that this is a good idea.

My current rabbits are so cute and cuddly. (The last lot were nasty. They died in a tragic incident involving a falcon. As awful as it was, I think the falcon did us a favor). Some advice on choosing a rabbit - my vet says the bigger the breed of rabbit the nicer they are. Bunnies make very garden-friendly poop - no need to wait, you can put fresh poo on the garden. I'm not sure it is very fertile though. I'll let you know how my vegie patch goes using it.

Frankly, the guinea pigs are a bit of a dead loss when it comes to unconditional lovin'. They just run away and hide whenever I approach the cage. The kids have no interest in them because they are so timid. Their poo can go straight on the garden, and they do make a lot of it.

The mice are not so nice. I mean they are cute and all, but geez, they stink! And we made sure we got females as they are apparently a lot less smelly as the boys, who use urine to mark their territory. They don't eat much, they smell, they don't make much poo either. In my opinion, don't bother, unless you are using their purchase as a bribe to encourage better behaviour in your seven year old.

So at the moment I am feeding most of the scraps to the animals, meat goes in the bokashi bin and then into the compost, and anything else goes into the compost bin.

Okay, time for some audience participation - tell us about your experiences! What works for you?