hey all,
I'm workin on a friends cacti garden up on the north coast of nsw. been a while since i was last here and the place has become completly overrun.
in 3 days i've already accumulated about two square meters of cacti and succulent waste. mainly agaves, cereus and opuntias.
Now what to do with all this shite? My thoughts were to build a bonfire over the top of it all, and let it burn. got a feeling this could be a lot of work. anyone have any experience with this kinda thing? or any one got some good ideas?

cheers.
prier.

compost ? breaks down fairly quickly in a compost bin i have noticed after pruning my sprawling opuntias

we tried that a few years ago. it's really hard to stop it all from growing and when we did we found it tends to turn to slime with spines, stinky stuff, really hard to handle.
I reckon the compost thing could work, maybe with smaller quantities if it was mixed through leaf litter, sawdust or something.
Thanks for ya input.
prier.

As long as a lid is on the bin to block out the light they break down well. Although my bins are well established with 1000 000s of worms

You might consider what I do with really difficult-to-kill weeds and seeds.

I soak them for a few weeks in bins stuffed with the waste and then filled with water. They drown, and then rot quickly enough. It's a stinky process, and you'll probably get rat-tail grubs which are harmless even though they look creepy, but the end result is a nice liquid manure for the garden, and mucky waste at the bottom that can go onto the compost heap, especially if it needs a little moistening.

The only thing to check is that any resilient seeds have in fact been in sufficiently long that they do drown and rot. It's a bit gross overall, but it works, and the result is 100% recycling of your organic waste.

Between chipping or burning thick wood waste, drowning recalcitrant weeds and seeds, and composting more benign matter, one should never have to export any vegetation from one's property. And really, if one does so, in the end one is shifting nutrients from there to somewhere else...

...blow that for a joke!