I suppose it is just "What you do" because we had a compost pile at home while I was growing up, until our dog Sapphire, a well-fed, wag-your-whole-body black lab garnered the title Compost Queen because she liked to roll in the pile. Even that didn't stop us, but the bears did. We still have to figure out how to bear-proof a compost heap.
Several years ago, the City of Tucson subsidized these great beehive compost bins, for which I got up EARLY to drive to the park to get in line for the limited supply of bins. Good thing for my efforts, because they soon ran out. One of my friends mentioned that she has hers in a garage, and doesn't use it because of a pest problem. When she offered to sell it to me, I started salivating.
I know--there is a lot of weird psychological stuff going on in these posts, from potty training to pushing buttons to salivating at the idea of rotting garbage. I'll leave the diagnoses to the professionals. But really, if you tasted some of the volunteer tomatoes, squash and other morsels that have sprung from my compost heap without any input from me, your mouth might start to water, too. And I KNOW that if you came over for dinner and got to snip your own salad herbs, rinse 'em, dress 'em and eat 'em, you wouldn't even chortle. Yum yum.
Compost is great. No matter how much organic waste I toss in, the pile stays about the same size. I water it, stir it around every once in a while, and keep adding kitchen scraps. My oldest kid eagerly volunteers, "I'll take out the compost, Mama!" (You have to train them early when you're a single mom with medical challenges. It's not slave labor, it's, uh, helpful education. No matter that he's still in preschool.)
I started going garden crazy this season, and I mined the soil for the first time at this house. Before that I'd had to be content with the five or six lucious volunteer compost-cultivated tomatoes I plucked each season. But now I'm getting deliberate about harvesting my dinner. I also had to do something to disguise those big silver cisterns in my yard after a neighbor complained that a big steel tank out in the desert was ugly. Give me a season for fast-growing Tombstone rose and trumpet vine, and it will be better. Especially if I scoop some of that moist, dark, wormy, spongy, aromatic compost and spread it liberally over the planting beds and tree wells.
What I like best is that it's EASY. Granted, I take out the trash in three separate containers, but that's a small effort. When I'm not well, I can just toss the scraps on the pile and go back to bed. I can leave it be and it will happen all by itself. My compost is the way I like my men: low maintenance, nurturing, darkly handsome... Okay, that's enough of that. I must be punchy this morning. Though there is something to that metaphor that bears investigation.
Here is some information for the novice composter. It's hard to mess it up, and there is compost for every scale and location. This is one area where I'm all for entropy... for a good cause.
Happy Composting!
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