chey a contained compost bin will keep out rats and mice, you could also use a worm bin if all you have is some food scraps and you could make that secure enough to keep out mice, or you can dig holes around the garden and bury the food waste. It's not the question you asked but you dont need to use your freezer as a food waste storage area :)

Thanks trancegemini for the suggestions. I want to make a worm bin soon, when time allows. And I do bury some things directly around my flowers but wanted to make sure that there weren't any food items that were a no-no for certains plants. For example, can coffee grounds be buried around all plants or just some? Thanks again! :)

tea, i pour that over my bushes, and pasta leftovers, i pure that and add more water to it and add that to my soil of roses , or any of them type of bushes, i am thinking of doing that to my tomatoe's. banana's the rotten one's, flowers, pure'd. sp. they just love it!!!

all food waste is good for plants so just mix it up for variety, it will just compost in the soil and then the plants can access the nutrients from it so any empty pockets of soil can be dug to bury them. If you have an area that isnt planted out you can also trench compost. it just involves digging a trench, filling it up (I usually put food scraps with shredded paper when I do this), cover it over and start the next trench beside it. by the time it's all finished the ground will be lovely with composty goodness to plant out that area. Ideally the worm bin will make it all much easier for you so you can just toss it all in there. the coffee grounds you can spread around the top of the soil, but if you have pets then I would just poke small holes instead and fill them up instead just to be on the safe side.

Not the answer to the question you were asking, but consider this. If the mice came in your house, evidently they weren't that thrilled with the compost pile outside?!? At random times mice are going to get into people's houses whether they have compost piles or not. So maybe you were worried about that for no reason, and could just compost again. I have put banana peels under things I was planting, and crushed egg shells, but what my plants like most is growing in a lasagna bed of extremely varied materials, so I can't say what they like most or don't like.

Marcia

I feed all my plants compost, and I give "special" food to the roses - egg shells, coffee grounds, and banana peels. Everyone who walks by my house stops and smells the roses, and when I am outside, they tell me they have NEVER seen such beautiful, huge roses. My grandmother fed her roses with the same things, so just carrying on a family tradition! We drink a lot of coffee, so have plenty of grounds. I do notice that I have tons of worms around my roses, more than I see anywhere else ( and I have a lot of worms in my soil!)

I have also used coffee grounds around other plants, usually when I get lots from a coffee house. Sprinkle them around anything - never seems to be a problem, and they disappear quickly. My kids joke that our plants look so good cause we have worms on speed! Probably true!

My Mom used to trench compost (not what she called it back then), but put it all in the blender first, making a sludge. She would then pour it in a trench, and cover it up. A few days later, tons of worms, and very little recognizable food bits. Worked for her, just like compost piles and lasagna gardens work for me. No mice, as long as you keep the pile turned and moist.
good luck!

KATHY

Have you ever thought about trying bokashi? I know a lot of composters on here seem to look at it with disdain, but I've done a couple batches now and quite simply, it's amazing.

Anyhow, to give you the long and short of it, it's essentially a trench composting method, whereby you bury all your compostable goods in a deep hole or trench and let nature's recyclers go to work. The difference with using bokashi is that it will "spoil" your food instead of rotting it, not much unlike "pickling" all of your scraps prior to burying.

The other plus is that you can actually compost meats and fats successfully with this method. The initial startup cost is a bit pricey (cost me about $40 for a bottle of EM-1 and a 35-lb bag of wheat bran to make my own bokashi, and made my own container from an empty cat litter pail), but the cost goes down very quickly the more you do it. Plus I also like the convenience of being able to toss my scraps straight into the bin and not worrying about rotting and all the nastiness that comes along with that.

I have to say that I've had the most success with Iguana Juice. I've used it indoors in hydroponics and outside in the garden (and even when I use it in hydroponics, I water the garden with the old nutrient solution when I do a reservoir change).

Hell I water everything with it, house plants, you name it. It just seems a waste to dump gallons of it down the drain (not to mention not being the most ecologically-sound choice. It can make the water treatment guys' jobs harder.)

Here is a link that might be useful: Iguana Juice