Good boy!  Go on!  Climb up there!  You can do it!

First and foremost, if you compost dog waste, DO NOT use that compost where you’re going to be growing vegetables.   Use it for your flower garden (but not where you have edible flowers that you might put on a salad).   Along those same lines, put your doggie composting area at least 15 feet from your veggie garden (preferably on the downhill side), since you don’t want contaminates leaching over into your food. This is a CITY gardening post, but if anyone reading this has a well, make sure that you keep it from leaching into your well water.   (I would say “Try not to think about it”, but thinking about it is exactly what we need to do.  But hey, it beats stepping in it every time you go out back.)

That being said, there are quite a few ways of dealing with dog poo in the back yard.  Although landfills don’t like dog waste (sanitation workers really don’t like it) and toilets don’t like it (drain clogging), eventually, your flowers might.

I would make your doggie compost area a separate compost area instead of just adding it to your usual pile.  The technique most favored seems to be digging a hole deep enough to hold a large plastic garbage can.  You don’t need a new garbage can.  In fact, if you have an old one that’s seen better days, so much the better, because you’re going to be cutting out its bottom, adding holes to the sides, and filling the bottom of it with rocks (once you’ve put it in the ground, of course).  Leave a few inches of can sticking above ground so that people can see it and avoid stepping on it.  You might even paint the top red or something.  Better yet, do something clever with the top.  ”Doggie Composter”,  ”Doo Drop Inn”, or something.  Send us a photo.

After that’s all done, you’re ready to start de-poohing your yard and building your compost.  With this method, you wont have to do anything other than add waste for years.  Of course, I guess that depends on how many dogs you have (and how big they are).

First, add the dog’s contribution.  Then, to quote a contributor on City Farmer, “Occasionally I add Septo-Bac, an enzyme-active biological compound formulated to increase the digestion rate of sewage”.  Septo-Bac isn’t the only septic tank starter on the market, and we’re not recommending it (or any other product), so look around.

Continue adding poop as you acquire it, add a bucket of water about once a week and a packet of septic tank starter about once a month.  And that’s it.

Digging the whole is the only difficult part, really.  And as our cities become more and more congested, the cities are getting tougher on dog poop.  Almost all cities now require that you pick up after your pet on the street (and it’s the right thing to do, anyway), but many – mine included- require that you pick up after fido in your own yard.  You can argue all you want about the government’s right to tell us what to do in our own yards, and you’d have a point, but speaking as someone who once couldn’t sit in his own patio because our thoughtless neighbors (long since moved away) allowed their three HUGE canines to do their business right at the fence beside our patio and NEVER cleaned it up.  We couldn’t sit there because of the smell and the flies.  These people had small children that played in that yard.  Well, I guess they developed strong immune systems.

Care2,  City Farmer,  Compost Info,  Apartment Therapy,  Alaska NRCS and Coco the Blogging Dog.

Filed under: Composting, Soil Amendment