Composting: For the world and for the garden

I like to think of myself as an environmentally conscious person.  Someone who makes an effort to think about how to live responsibly in the environment around her.  That is why as I was preparing for the birth of my daughter (3 years ago), I was doing all sorts of research on cloth and reusable diapers.  I was insistent that we would not contribute thousands of diapers (that would pretty much never biodegrade) to the landfill.   Six months later we are in the hospital, desperately trying to figure out how you take care of a newborn baby and change those teeny tiny diapers!  I was so overwhelmed with the major life changes and the intricacies of caring for my new daughter, that I was too scared to do anything differently than what I learned in the hospital.  Two years later…we are still using the same diapers.  Ugh.  So disappointed in myself =(

I have always been obsessed with recycling  –> in college, I bullied my room mates into letting me put 5 different brown paper bags along our kitchen wall for each different type of recycling.  In medical school, I used to send visitors home from my apartment with bags of recycling that my building wouldn’t take!  On a recent trip to California, I learned that San Francisco actually requires people to compost by law.  You should put your little compost bin out with your trash and recycling, and the city takes it to a big huge compost place.  How amazng is that??  For most people the rate limiting step in composting is first, the space for the bin and second, the grossness of dealing with the actual compost bin and its many inhabitants.

Last summer when we moved into our house which has quite a bit of land, my desire to reduce waste fortunately overpowered my repulsion towards insects, and I bought a compost tumbler so I could start composting.  I couldn’t deal with having to mix the compost manually or visually seeing the insects etc, so I went with a tumbler.  It is closed, and sits on a base with wheels to make it easy to rotate.  Which is great!  Although the sticker on the outside says it can make compost within 2 weeks, it is almost full after 8 months and I can still make out most of the food!  I think the cold weather is obviously a compost deterrent…but hopefully it will start “cooking” soon!  I actually just bought a second tumbler (this one actually collects the compost tea in the base) so that I could use that for the next year and let the first one “work.” 

I have been basically throwing in anything that was once living – except meat.  That includes all old leftovers and things that have gone bad in the fridge.  Anyway – although I started the compost to reduce waste (“compost for the world”) with the plan of literally dumping the spoil out back, I am now really excited to use it for my garden!  I’m anticipating it wont be ready until next summer, but I’ll probably put it to better use then also.  Speaking of compost, half our plot is almost a big natural compost bin for the ridiculous number of leaves that fall every year from the 5 story tall trees all over the place.  Luv and I have never owned so much land before this house and thus had NO appreciation for the upkeep needed to care for it with all trees we have everywhere.  We both had the ridiculous notion that after having 6 weeks of snow on the ground, the leaves would just kind of “melt away” with it.  Umm….NOPE.  I think they were just preserved and have been laughing at us all this time.  So we have been trying to rake them little by little…I’m afraid it might never be done!  You can see in the pictures that you can barely make out the lawn because of all the leaves all over the place!

We have been throwing around the idea of buying a leaf shredder – which would help the compost and could perhaps serve as mulch too! But not sure we can dish out all that money! we’ll see…

this is actually supposed to be a really pretty shaped bed surrounded by grass near the pool