When MK and I lived in Fort Worth, we had three giant cardboard boxes. They were filled with paper, aluminum cans and other recyclables. We took our food trash out to the tree at the back of our house and dumped it in a hole in the ground. We did so good at reducing our waste that the trash company stopped making regular stops at our house because we never had any bags at the curb! I want to get back there again, it really is a good feeling to know that your making a difference.
My last few attempts at gardening failed miserably. The first spring I did really good planting and nurturing, but everything went to anarchy. The herbs bulleted white flowers and tasted bitter, the tomato plants fell over, the zucchini plant grew some gross fungus that I didn't know how to get rid of. My one strawberry that grew was eaten by a bird and the grass and weeds took over so fast I didn't know what to do. It turned into a wild jungle, and I was getting bigger and bigger with my pregnancy. At the most critical moment in the gardens life, it was too hard for me to bend down and over and pull weeds. I succumbed to defeat. This last spring, I did a half hearted attempt at gardening by putting seeds in the ground. The idea was to start the seedlings in the old garden and move them to the raised beds we had made. Well, at first everything grew great, but instead of moving them early like I had planned, I got lazy, time ran away from me, and the grass took over. I couldn't even find my peppers or sage underneath the jungle. Then, to make matters worse, we had a drought from Hates this summer. It's been over 100 degrees for a ridiculous number of days and I don't remember the last time it rained. So, they would have died anyways.
Well, I have decided not to give up on my quest for fresh vegetables. I will make a fall garden, and I will do it right. Now that I have my blog, I have a tendency to stick to my commitments a bit more. I feel a loyalty to my readers to follow through with what I say I will do. Not to say I won't fail at it, but at least I will try! Texas has a mild winter so I am sure I can grow some peas, beans, kale, carrots, potatoes, pumpkins and butternut squash. I'm excited, but it's easy for me to create goals that are hard to achieve. So first, I will start with the very basics...composting.
Some people make composting seem very difficult and expensive. They have those plastic barrels that cost five hundred dollars, and the complicated multi-layered handmade wooden boxes with red wigglers. They have all these rules for how to layer brown over green and what foods will decay the fastest. It's enough to make your head spin. So, for all you guys out there that have little time and money to spend on something as simple as making dirt, here's my method for my fall compost.
I live at the dead end of a street surrounded by beautiful pine trees, with a creek that runs behind us. Even though we live in the middle of the city on a busy highway, we can retreat into our little neck of the woods and pretend like we're in an ancient forest far away from the world. This is where my compost will be. I will go into the woods and dig a hole of relatively large size and throw my kitchen scraps into it. It will be fall soon, so then as the leaves come off the trees it will fall into the hole. Every two or three days I'll take my shovel out there and stir it around a bit. Any smell that might occur will be minimal and be gone within a few hours. Besides there are no neighbors in the woods to complain about it. Even in Fort Worth when we had our backyard compost (and believe me we had a crazy, nosy old lady that lived next door that would call code compliance at the drop of a hat) no one ever noticed, and it never smelled.
You have to be careful what you put in your compost but the rules are mostly based on common sense. You only put things in there that can easily decompose, but won't cause disease to spread in the soil and then to your plants. No plastics, metals or glass. No meat or cat box droppings (although I've heard that droppings from chickens and birds are good for it, don't take my word for it though do a little more research before you try it). If you put paper in there, it's best if you shred it first.
So, I will start that new project this week and keep you posted on it. I encourage you guys to start your own compost, whether it's my simple version or the more organized expensive one. Either way let me know how it works out, and I'll share it with our readers. I want this blog to be about more than just my efforts, I want it to be a community of people who care about the environment and inspire one another to do simple things to make our own lives easier and to reduce our negative impact on Gaia. Good luck guys, and I hope to hear from you soon!
No comments:
Post a Comment