Compost Problem Solving Day – Before 9 a.m.
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero
I would like to go on record here as saying that I wholeheartedly believe that this is true. I have multiple reasons, but the one that comes to mind at the moment is that if you’re going to garden with any kind of seriousness, you’re going to need the information in that library to figure what the heck to do with the garden – every step of the way. Cicero’s sentiment has particular resonance for me this morning because I also believe that the following (from Mike and Nancy Bubel) is true – that experience can be translated to mean “doing it wrong the first time”.
How do I know? Check it out. Does this look like compost to you?
My two favorite books right now are the Bubels’ Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables, and Steve Soloman’s Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food In Hard Times. I pulled out Gardening When It Counts this morning because I woke with a feeling of restless agitation, an inability to concentrate, and an un-assuageable drive to DO something. So … today is the day I solve the composting problem – hopefully without too much flexing of the checkbook.
Quite a few years of studying philosophy has shown me that you can’t solve a problem (in the real world OR in the metaphysical one) unless you can define that problem, so here goes.
Essentially, there are two problems. Make that two “problem areas.” There is The Inside Problem, and The Outside Problem. The Inside Problem deals with how to handle the food scraps before they ever make it outside, and I’m going to save discussion of The Inside Problem for another post. Today we’re heading outside.
The Outside Problem is the mess that I’ve already shown you. It contains the season’s worth of food scraps, dead vegetable plants (with and without vine borers, seeds, and who knows what else), gigantic weeds pulled haphazardly and far too infrequently from the summer garden, at least one dead snake, at least one cardboard box, and a very flimsy and unsatisfactory tomato cage. Oh, and at this point, LOTS of yucky grub-like organisms that have sprung into existence there and are quite obviously having the time of their lives.
The problem is further complicated by the fact that we have a pack of dogs, so whatever we do has to be appropriately fenced off so that the scraps are unavailable to them. They don’t look too intimidating, but believe me, they’re crafty when it comes to snatching scraps out of the “compost” pile, and my raw-foodie cocker would rather eat melon than meat.
We have an out of the way spot picked out for this new pile, but it’s currently full of grass clippings … this I believe is known as putting the cart before the horse.
Still, as my husband quite rightly pointed out, this most recent massive grass cutting will probably be our last big one of the year, and if we want to do something useful with the grass clippings then we needed to rake them up and pile them somewhere (we don’t have a bagger).
So … my idea was to use the same materials that I did for our un-composting disaster pile – cheap fence posts and rabbit guard – and to close off a much larger space this time, enough space that I can make a pile on one side and then move that pile to the other side. But I feel like I don’t have a whole lot of room here to work. I SO wish I could just go buy one of those big composting turning barrel thingies. But that’s not what we’re (trying to be) about here, so out comes Steve Solomon, the “gardening grandfather that I never had.” Except that I DID have a gardening grandfather of my own.
But he’s been deceased for some years now. I think about him often and really miss him these days. But I didn’t see him all that often before he passed away, since he lived a thousand miles away from me; and quite frankly, I’m ashamed to say, when it came to gardening know-how back then I was happy to pick and eat the produce, but I wasn’t exactly paying rapt attention to the know-how. Enter Steve Solomon.
Anyway … It’s a cool September morning and I’m out here on the deck eating my breakfast and waiting for my daughter to wake up, and now I pause to read.
Compost Problem Solving Day – Noon
Well, after reading enough of Mr. Solomon’s compost chapter to feel thoroughly intimidated, I’ve come up with a plan. This rabbit guard and flimsy fence post thing just isn’t going to cut it. I don’t have enough materials on hand to make an enclosure big enough for me to make what should be an effective compost heap, to be able to move around it, and to keep my dogs the heck away from it. I have no problem going and getting more materials if that’s what it takes the get the job done – except that it doesn’t. I have a better idea. It’s this.
Nope, not the rabbit guard in the foreground…the 6 foot tall chain link fence in the background, that’s standing in front of the privacy fence.
I bought this kennel earlier this year in yet another attempt to solve The Dog Problem. They quite refused to be kenneled quietly in it, and its use as a kennel was short-lived. So then I moved it to the side of the yard as you see above to distance my four dogs from our neighbor’s four (or five?) dogs. The neighbors keep their dogs out all the time, and the whole crew tends to get into an insane barking frenzy the moment my dogs step out the door. (I’m going to resist the opportunity to enlarge upon how unbelievably annoying this is. Moving on.)
This fence is an eyesore here anyway, and even though it DID cut down enormously on the fence-barking frenzy, it’s no longer doing any good, because the whole area has been reconfigured because of our immanent construction and now the dogs can get behind it, so Voila! I’m going to go with this as a compost enclosure.
I’ve eaten lunch, fed the kid, and bathed the muddy, groundhog-obsessed cocker spaniel, and I’m heading outside now with a craftsman wrench.
Compost Problem Solving Day – 1:38 p.m.
Well, once I decided what to do, doing it was pretty short work. It’s still an expensive solution to the problem, but it’s hundreds of bucks I wasted months ago, and not hundreds of bucks I’m wasting today; and if it works well then the money I spent on this thing won’t have been wasted at all, and that’ll be a good thing.
So, Phase 1 of The Great Compost Project is complete, and it looks like this.
It’ll keep the dogs out, keep the decomposing stuff contained, and give me some room to work so that maybe I can actually do something useful with all of our scraps.
What’s to come? Well, phases 2, 3 and 4 are as follows:
Phase 2: Organize what’s in this cage so that I can collect stuff through the rest of the fall, and then build the compost heap. That’s going to involve moving all of these already nicely-rotting grass clippings up into one corner so that I can put them on as I build the pile at the end of the fall. I think I’m going to need a pitchfork for that. I can’t WAIT to get my pitchfork!
Phase 3: Develop a new in-house system for collecting food scraps. I think I need something bigger than the bowl that I’ve been using, so that the project requires less-frequent trips out to the heap.
Phase 4: Actually build the compost heap so that I will have compost for the spring. I’m still a little fuzzy on this step, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out, if I keep reading Steve Solomon and apply myself to it.
So, there you go: a problem-solving project well begun. I feel better already.
