Compost = June 24, 2023

Yesterday was something of a "red letter day" in my gardening history.

Yesterday, I spread my first batch of home-made compost around some tomato plants in our vegetable garden. 

This particular batch of compost began "cooking" nearly a year ago, when The Husband gave me a small compost bin for my birthday.  I already had a composter, but it was (1) big and unruly and (2) situated in a spot that made me worry about snakes, spiders, and such. 

See the black cannon-looking thing behind my newly-built compost bin?  (My granddaughters decorated the new bin.)  My sister gave me that black composter over years ago.  Now that I think about it, this composter did produce one small batch of compost.  The problem was that it was a b*tch to get the compost out.  AND when I dumped it, out ran the biggest spider I have ever seen in my life.  

Here's the composter The Husband gave me for my birthday last year. We parked it closer to the back door, in a non-creepy spot, in the hope that I would use it.  

It has two compartments.  I suppose one is for finished compost, and the other is for in-progress compost.  I have been sporadically adding things - mostly un-shredded dry leaves with occasional wet kitchen scraps - to both compartments.  After a year, the stuff in the right-hand compartment still looks pretty much like it looked when I put it in.  But in the left-hand compartment, this spring I added shredded leaves and wood chips.

Neither compost tumbler gets tumbled very often.

I figured an actual compost bin might be the solution, so I built one out of pallets, thinking I could tend the compost more conveniently.  That proved to be true, but the bin presents other problems.  

I know what you're thinking, and it's all true.  I don't know what I'm doing.  With all the tools at my disposal, I should have made enough compost to fill the world, but I haven't even made enough to fill the low spot in the vegetable garden.

I will keep trying.

There is one bright spot, though.  There were THREE big, fat earthworms in the compost that came out of the left-hand compartment of the birthday composter.  How they got in there is a mystery.  Although we can dig just about anywhere in our yard and find earthworms, we NEVER see one in the vegetable garden.  Are we chopping them up with the tiller?  Whatever is the case, I have been contemplating buying worms from a bait shop and relocating them to the garden (and still plan to do it).  Finding those worms in the compost made me so happy.  I took the compost to the garden, spread it around the tomato plants, and told the worms, "Be fruitful, and multiply!  Run free!"  

I hope the mid-day sun didn't dry them up before they had a chance to drill down into the ground.