I’ve made compost!
I realize that this is both misleading and underwhelming for most readers, since I myself didn’t exactly MAKE the compost—that was various small to extra-small organisms—and composting is old hat for a lot of you.
For me, however, successful compost is actually a first.
As many of you know, I haven’t had that long with any given garden, owing to a lot of moving around, so this is the longest I’ve ever been in a garden. And I had a compost bin, but it was sited very badly, on top of a hillside that’s a clay desert at the top and a swamp at the bottom. This sucked all the moisture out of the compost, and the hillside, when covered in leaves, became an ankle-breaking Zone of Treacherous Footing.
So I had given up on ever getting good compost. And that was okay, because I have great luck with sheet mulching, which is sort of in-ground composting, and the compost bin was still useful as a dumping ground for banana peels, onion tops, wilted lettuce and a great many eggshells.
Yesterday, in a fit of energy, with nothing much to do in the soggy and muddy and supposed-to-be-dormant garden, I moved the bin to someplace wetter and more easily accessible, and when I’d pitchforked the top layer into the wheelbarrow, what I found underneath was…compost.
Beautiful! Crumbly! Brown! Yes, okay, heavy on the eggshells. But compost! Six or seven buckets worth!
I dumped a bucket out on my future tomato spot, and then I stopped, because it’s the middle of winter and nothing really needs compost right now. But compost! Eeee! It’s like a magic trick! Even in the most inhospitable of locations, it works!
Originally published at Squash's Garden. You can comment here or there.