In my neck of the woods I call this turdblossom season because all the melting snow reveals all the dog turds on the lawn to clean up. After doing so I noticed I had a pretty large pile of dog turds that are not great for normal compost and I also have a fair amount of food waste from the house that is things that the worms in the worm bin I have don't like such as citrus and meat/bone scraps. I read a post by @samstonehill where he was looking for composting ideas and I mentioned the Black Soldier Fly Larvae. In responding I talked myself into building a bin for them and making a post about it so here goes.

I didn't want to spend a lot of money on this so I wanted to try to use things I already had like this large garbage bin that was left over from another experiment, here are the materials I expected to use:

The only thing I bought was the black drain tube, its like a giant bendy straw, I suggest not opening it up until you are done cutting it, the piece I bought stretches out to 10 feet, it cost about $5 at the Depot. The first thing I did was use the end as a template to cut my hole:

At this point I thought I was going to be using my sawzall to cut the hole so I used a drill bit to start the hole to make it easy to use a saw, if you have a skill saw that would work great but I don't have one.

Anyhow all the batteries for the saw turned out to be dead so I grabbed the Dremel tool to cut the hole and It came out pretty good fit on the first try:

So then I pulled through enough of the drain pipe to form a nice elbow coming out the side and measured and cut most of the pipe in half, I did one cut with the Dremel tool but that was slow and messy (black specks of molten plastic everywhere) so for cutting the other side of the pipe I just used Wiss utility shears and they made short work of it without plastic flying in my face. @papa-pepper has a great post about those shears. This turns my 10 foot pipe into maybe 18 feet of ramp for fly larvae and spout.

My next task was to try to affix the pipe to the side of the garbage bin to form a spiral ramp. My first idea was to use the plastic welder in the second picture to weld the pipe to the side of the trash can since they are both plastic but the material of the pipe was so thin I just melted right through. My second thought was to use staples but those didn't hold well and cracked the side of the trash can so finally I used good old zipties. Better to not have any metal to rust also. I drilled a couple of holes an inch or two apart and put the zip tie through and that held things together real nice, that's the way to go here.

I did three or four more of those and I had the drain pipe secured how I wanted it.

Next I drilled a couple of one holes in the bottom for drainage, one came out a little rough but that's fine. Because the garbage can is old the plastic is brittle.

The finished product in place is in the top picture. For ventilation I had already cut the square hole in the top for my other experiment, I will use the flap to put a piece of cardboard on the inside of the lid for the flies to lay their eggs on. All I have left to do is cut a hole in a bucket lid and prop the collection bucket up high enough so it can reach the downspout. My next step is to send away on Amazon for some live Black Soldier Fly larvae, these may also be available from pet stores that sell exotic reptiles. The idea is that the larvae eat whatever you throw in there and then when they get big they climb up the ramp and then fall into the bucket. They self harvest. Then they can be used as a high protein feed for chickens, fish reptiles or even very adventurous people after being dried out. I will probably use mine as a soil amendment. I read something that said you should put coco coir on the bottom but I will just use some old sticks and potting soil as a bed before I put in the dog poop and food waste. When my fly larvae arrive I may keep them inside for a little while in a jar or something until it is a little warmer. They don't really tolerate cold weather.

Any questions?

This is an @funbobby51 original for @steemit and @informationwar, all photos and text are mine, please resteem and upvote and comment to encourage me to do this more!

Part II is here, the flies arrive