I have jars upon jars of homemade pickles from my grandmother. While I don't throw out the pickles, too tasty, I do dump out the juice and dill sprigs. I don't know anything about the bacteria questions, but it's all disappeared relatively quickly. I've put the dill sprigs in both the compost and vermicompost bins, but have only dumped the juice in the compost bin.

Yup, though if you had, say, a five gallon bucket of them, I might not add them all at once. Too much of anything can throw the balance off.

As a general rule of thumb about composting, if you can eat it you can compost it. However reason also enters in and putting an extremely large amount of something into the compost may create some problems that may take longer for the bacteria to correct for you. In my 4 x 4 compost bins a few pickles, maybe a quart, would not be a problem but in a smaller pile it could upset the apple cart.

Don't pickles and their juices have a lot of salt? I try to avoid putting very salty foods or liquids in compost.

nygardener, the key is the volume of what you are adding to the volume of what you are adding it to. Pluncking a quart of pickles and that juice into a 0.5 cubic foot compost pile would overwhelm that compost while it may have little affect on a 2.5 cubic foot compost pile or larger.

It might not hurt a large compost pile, but I'm not sure with all that salt it would help it.

Here is a link that might be useful: Pickle recipe

Pickles GO bad?

i never knew that
what's next? cake?
Just kidding... everyone knows cake never goes bad :)

not in my house.

I am afraid my forgotten pickled and dilly beans in the basement frig....are destined for compost but i wanted to check if that was safe

I would pour off the juice (into a drain, not compost or soil) and rinse the beans first. The juice will be very acidic and salty and there will be salt on the beans.

For those of us that live in rural areas with septic tanks pouring pickle juice down the drain could well upset the bacteria that digest the waste in that septic tank, so down the drain would not be a better option than in the compost pile.

For those that have a municipal sewer system all kinds of stuff get dumped down the drain anyway so it may not matter how much more pollution is added to that waste water, except that it will be recycled and you may end up drinking that water.

Trigger warning; just a one time anecdote. Recently I poured some pickle juice on some morning glories growing in cracks in the driveway and they got rather sickly looking before resuming growth.

Polluter! Environmental vandal! ;-)

I was glad for rinsing advice and I will be throwing pickle juice on my many weeds. 8-). Thank you

Toxcrusadr is right on, in my experience. While a lot of salt or vinegar could theoretically 'upset the balance,' it would have to be a lot. From the recipe above, 2/3 of a cup of salt is not so much in a large pile and certainly not a normal-sized septic tank (which would likely be 1000 gallons, plus or minus). I've had to throw a _lot_ of pickled stuff in a compost pile (move of an elderly relative, stuff had accumulated), and it had no noticeable impact on the pile. Stuff broke down pretty quickly, too - pickled goods will decompose once exposed to air and bacteria, and the brine just washes out through other stuff. Of course, industrial quantities might be different, but that's true of many things in a compost pile.

"For those of us that live in rural areas with septic tanks pouring
pickle juice down the drain could well upset the bacteria that digest
the waste in that septic tank, so down the drain would not be a better
option than in the compost pile."

A quart (or even 5 gallons, for that matter) of brine diluted in 500 or 1,000 gallons "could well upset" the microbial balance? Really?

That's quite a claim, even for you.