Friday, March 27, 2009

Composting

Composting. Can you believe that this is a photo about composting??

It looks more like an ad for a florist....maybe a florist who composts.

Jackie, at the "Smoothpebble" blog, wrote about composting today, and her compost bucket today is quite lovely, isn't it?

Here's mine.

I keep it in the crisper drawer in my fridge. After a winter break from doing it, I have begun composting again this week.

After we dump the last fall leaves on the pile, I don't mess with my compost pile for much of the winter. I figure it isn't going to properly rot for a while. Then there's the whole problem of walking up the hill to the compost pile in my bathrobe...in the winter. Brr... (Because the bathrobe is the proper attire when dumping stuff on the compost pile, right?)

After discovering some great plumes of funk rising out of my crisper drawer earlier in the week, I discovered that I had some prime candidates for the compost pile. After a few days of mellowing up there, I uncovered them today. You can see that they haven't disintegrated much yet.


This is one of the indicators of a happy compost pile. Fat happy worms.
I see the earthworms as my little buddies. I feed them delicious vegetables and look after them. When I turn over the compost and accidentally cut one in half, I feel sad. Worms are such wonderful creatures for the earth, I hate when I kill one.

I'd love to have one of these to keep in the house:

You actually compost in this thing called a can-o-worms and you can keep it in the house. I just KNOW that I would knock it over. I love worms, but not enough to have them crawling on my kitchen floor.

Do you compost?



5 comments:

Unlimited said...

When I was in elementary school, we did a few environmental lessons on taking care of our land, and I had this particular attachment to the lessons on composting. I went home and threw everything in the fridge older than 4 days in a pile in the backyard. Grandma was not pleased.
And turns out that Grandpa didn't like my selection of location - right next to his latest outdoor project: boat building.
I will try again in my own yard one day :)

Tara said...

No, but probably should. Those worms give me the creeps though. LOL.... Don't worms live on even when they get cut in half?

Jackie said...

Ooooohhh, I have those big fat worms in mine too, and I always feel bad when I cut them with the shovel. I really thought when you were talking about your worms you were doing the vermiculture (the scientific term for those indoor composting worms) I did it once with Marshall's 6th grade class. It didn't really work, but I'm not sure they did the best job tending them. So I dumped the whole thing in the compost pile at home.
I couldn't see your compost picture so I'm going to check your flickr for it, cause you made me laugh!

Sara Bowen said...

I hear that in cold climates the thing to do with your worm bin is to insulate the outside of it either with straw wrapped around and fastened with twine or using compressed polystyrene like you get in packaging materials... I'm just thinking maybe you could do this and put the worm bin outside your back door? Thinking of you braving the cold in winter in your bathrobe is making me feel chilly! Sara x

GratefulPrayerThankfulHeart said...

I love to visit your place... it sometimes causes unexpected chuckles... like accidentally cutting worms in half. It makes you sad, but it makes me giggle.