Pink Think: “The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul.” – Alfred Austin
I’ve developed a very strange passion lately…for compost. I’m this obsessed – yesterday, at my daughter’s horse show, I couldn’t wait to get home and start working on adding some organic material to my flower beds. In the rain. In 50 degree weather. Which I did today.
It all kind of started with this little container that I saw at the mall.
The saleslady told me it was a compost jar, the kind you can put your fruit and vegetable peels instead of throwing in the trash. It made me think of my sister when she lived in the Philippines. She composted her veggie scraps and I thought that was super-cool and responsible. Well, this little container was normally $40 but it was marked wrong for $6. Thus, I took it home and now sits on a prominent place on our counter.
The next thing I needed to do was to make a compost pile. There’s plenty of room in our yard for one, but my husband and I still wanted to be strategic about the location. So we tucked it behind the horse’s hay pile. Which works great because then we can add some old hay to ward off pests. Like racoons. (My husband laughs at me about my racoon-oittering. I’ve never seen one around our property, but if I were a racoon, I’d go for this kind of stuff.)
Honestly, if some animal really wanted the scraps, they can get to them, but this is the part where I’m so excited about this. This compost bin was made of free palettes we scored from the hardware store. Double-responsible!
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Okay, it’s not pretty, but it’s a compost bin after all. In fact,
the nice thing about this set-up is, it’s portable and can be dismantled for access at any time. |
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| Look at all these egg shells, hay and veggie scraps, happily composting! |
Then last week, I visited my parents and saw they had tree branches with leaves that someone had cleared and bagged for them. My dad couldn’t understand why I was giddy to have said junk that he was just going to throw away. For anyone who is starting from scratch with a yard, leaves of any kind is like gold.
A couple weeks ago, my husband and I got steer manure from a neighbor, and finally incorporated it into our soil (our soil is hard clay, and hardens like concrete). I got buff arms from the tiller and got it all mixed in. Now it was time to add the leaves.
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| Um, what are you doing? |
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| Oh! This is good stuff! |
Our horses thought the leaves looked yummy. Which made me think I should add some of their own, um, fertilizer, to my flower beds. Some people think horse manure is bad for your beds. But a gardener friend of mine adds some to his soil, and he has a lush estate. Why not? It’s free, and there’s plenty.
Here’s the finished product. All ready for my plants! Yay!
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