Let’s see. I’ve hacked up half a leaf bag of ragweed, half a leaf bag of dogbane, another leaf bag of still more weeds — and there’s just no way my compost tumblers can keep up. So with bags of weeds and trimmings standing by, I am discovering yet more denizens of the compost pile: soldier flies.
They’re called soldier flies because some species have bright stripes on them. Shouldn’t that make them sergeant flies? And these guys aren’t all that colorful.
Nor is a more well-known relation, Black Soldier Fly, which is well-known if you’re a protaculture geek, or you keep chickens. Similar to vermicomposting, you dump vegetable scraps into your container and let critters chow on them, except in this case it’s these ginormous larvae. It gets weirder when they’re ready to pupate because they crawl away from the food source, find a safe spot in the ground, and come out for a day or two to mate, lay eggs, and die. Ew.
It looks like the soldier flies in my leaf bags are doing something similar, but no way am I going digging into the bags to find the larvae. I’m sticking with worms.
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