Friday, February 29, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
Saturday, February 23, 2008
What's Rotting?
Compost is a big thing for me. Hasn't always been, but has been again since I returned to being a novice gardener two years ago. I don't believe I have accomplished the ideal composting environment, but I sure like my compost bucket--a present to me from me for my thirty-sixth birthday. My plan is to show a photo when the compost in the bucket is especially beautiful, because sometimes (as I'll bet you know) the scraps of fruits and vegetables and other odds and ends are simply lovely to look at, and provocative, too, because they make us think of all sorts of possibilities for things to make and eat. Here's a curriculum vitae of my composting experience:
Birth to age 18--living on a farm, everything that rots is fair game to throw across the fence out the back door. Yay! That means fatty, gristly, bony food scraps as well as conventional composting candidates. Out the door it goes, out of the way, to rot in peace and feed whatever critters may enjoy it. Since we didn't have chickens or hogs most of the time I was growing up, we just left it there for the opossums (or whomever).
College years--not much composting going on here, except for the last year, when three of us shared an upstairs apartment and used a big plastic ice cream bucket wired to the window handle (?) to keep the bucket (and its various odors) outside our kitchen. A happy memory from this period was when Vanessa and Natasha hid a birthday gift for me in the (not at all smelly) scraps of the compost bucket. What a fun treasure hunt that was.
Early married life--not much composting here, either, except for when we lived in Indiana and had a decent-sized back yard. We put chicken wire around little metal fence posts and had a right respectable compost pit. Oh, it was good to take all that stuff outside! And it was even better to keep a garden with a 23 or 24 year-old prodigy whose skills in gaining a Ph. D. in organizational psychology were put to good use in mapping out our plot on graph paper and establishing a very productive garden...whose soil was never enriched by compost from my pit located two miles from the garden.
Return to Kansas--right off, I felt waay too busy for composting or setting up composting or gardening in general. During our first few years back in Kansas we went to Indiana to visit my youngest sister and watched her and her household and neighbors engage in the most mysterious rite: a weekly Sunday evening compost bucket shower. Yes, one lucky person got to walk the compost outside and then have the contents of the bucket dumped over his/her head. I think you just had to be part of that whole scene to appreciate it, though I can imagine being able to do so--especially in my early twenties. The people who (I imagine) instituted this ritual are now instrumental in this.
2006 to present--I started gardening again in 2006, because I just couldn't not any longer. My little plot isn't very productive, but I'm trying to amend the soil, keep it loose or friable or whatever, and avoid putting poisonous stuff on the soil or what grows in it. To that end, informed by my quick read of Lasagna Gardening, I started composting again in a big heap outside our back yard fence. The bind weed took that spot over, so now I'm composting on a concrete slab in our back yard. Is that even okay? I don't know? Anyway, it makes me happy to add things to the compost pile, and I love seeing the scraps of food we eat being transformed into something else. That's the best!
So there's my C.V. When my camera comes back from its most recent holiday, I'll start posting photos of all the lovely rotting. Happy composting to all who read this (and also compost)!
Birth to age 18--living on a farm, everything that rots is fair game to throw across the fence out the back door. Yay! That means fatty, gristly, bony food scraps as well as conventional composting candidates. Out the door it goes, out of the way, to rot in peace and feed whatever critters may enjoy it. Since we didn't have chickens or hogs most of the time I was growing up, we just left it there for the opossums (or whomever).
College years--not much composting going on here, except for the last year, when three of us shared an upstairs apartment and used a big plastic ice cream bucket wired to the window handle (?) to keep the bucket (and its various odors) outside our kitchen. A happy memory from this period was when Vanessa and Natasha hid a birthday gift for me in the (not at all smelly) scraps of the compost bucket. What a fun treasure hunt that was.
Early married life--not much composting here, either, except for when we lived in Indiana and had a decent-sized back yard. We put chicken wire around little metal fence posts and had a right respectable compost pit. Oh, it was good to take all that stuff outside! And it was even better to keep a garden with a 23 or 24 year-old prodigy whose skills in gaining a Ph. D. in organizational psychology were put to good use in mapping out our plot on graph paper and establishing a very productive garden...whose soil was never enriched by compost from my pit located two miles from the garden.
Return to Kansas--right off, I felt waay too busy for composting or setting up composting or gardening in general. During our first few years back in Kansas we went to Indiana to visit my youngest sister and watched her and her household and neighbors engage in the most mysterious rite: a weekly Sunday evening compost bucket shower. Yes, one lucky person got to walk the compost outside and then have the contents of the bucket dumped over his/her head. I think you just had to be part of that whole scene to appreciate it, though I can imagine being able to do so--especially in my early twenties. The people who (I imagine) instituted this ritual are now instrumental in this.
2006 to present--I started gardening again in 2006, because I just couldn't not any longer. My little plot isn't very productive, but I'm trying to amend the soil, keep it loose or friable or whatever, and avoid putting poisonous stuff on the soil or what grows in it. To that end, informed by my quick read of Lasagna Gardening, I started composting again in a big heap outside our back yard fence. The bind weed took that spot over, so now I'm composting on a concrete slab in our back yard. Is that even okay? I don't know? Anyway, it makes me happy to add things to the compost pile, and I love seeing the scraps of food we eat being transformed into something else. That's the best!
So there's my C.V. When my camera comes back from its most recent holiday, I'll start posting photos of all the lovely rotting. Happy composting to all who read this (and also compost)!
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