It’s amazing to me how a little filth is the thin line between average Joe (me before The Great Compost Experiment of the Summer of 2013) and warlord of the garden (me after The Great Compost Experiment of the Summer of 2013).
In May 9 edition’s Happy Trails, I wrote about our failed attempt at worm composting, which resulted in a couple hundred worms squiggling around my garage. You may remember that we abandoned our worm composting efforts and opted for the standard “We’ll just let it rot” approach. I even remember using the words “clean,” “fresh,” and “simple.”
Oh, the irony!
Composting on the La Pelusa homestead this summer has been anything but clean, fresh, and simple. It’s frankly been dirty, rotten, and complex.
Things were moving along fine until we decided that maybe keeping the compost (housed in two 33-gallon plastic bins, one with holes for aeration that the waste actually sits in, the other to catch drippings) on our porch, directly next to our front door, wasn’t the best place for it. By it, I mean garbage.
I was never the biggest proponent to keeping a compost, so under my authority, we moved the compost bins to the side yard, where I positioned it conspicuously behind a lilac bush, both to help mask the smell and hide it from view. My wife previously advised me the smell wouldn’t be an issue if the compost was cared for correctly. My wife is the brains of this endeavor, yet I somehow got tasked with the upkeep and maintenance. The smell is an issue, Honey, oh, it really is!
About two weeks after I moved the compost to the side yard, I had to go out and “turn” it. Turning it means thinking you can use a hard rake to mix up the compost but you end up actually having to us a hand rake and dig your arms down to your elbows into weeks’ old kitchen scraps and tell yourself you’re bettering the environment.
When I popped open the lid, a swarm of flies buzzed out in a heaping cloud. They landed on my clothes, in my hair, in my ears, and other places I don’t really care to discuss. I ran to my hose and practically took a shower in my side yard, passersby be darned. My wife was right at this time, though, the smell wasn’t really an issue, and I was partway encouraged to not rake my skin clean off my body because the compost was working and rapidly at that. We had very rich, dark compost!
I packed up the compost, returned it to its place behind the lilac bush and decided to see how this played out.
Then the rains started and turned our compost into a swamp.
Most people store sports equipment or old clothes in plastic bins. Pop open our bins, and it looks like storage for the walking dead. The last time I went out to “feed” the compost, I was afraid something was going to shoot out at me, like a hand, no, a claw, and pull me in. A good Stephen King line comes to mind: “We float. We allllllll float down here.”
Worst of all, I can’t move it any longer. Too heavy. It’s a couple hundred pounds of primordial muck on the verge of producing a new, primitive life form. I’m not entirely certain that qualifies as helping save the environment.
