Dear Kid,
It’s Memorial Day. You knew that. And if you want to read my serious thoughts on the day, you can find them here and here. If you want my thoughts about Memorial Day hot dogs, click here.
But today is far more than Memorial Day. It is also Learn About Composting Day.
I am not joking.
Learn About Composting Day was created by the Holiday Insights people in 2011. I have no idea (absolutely no idea) why they would pick Memorial Day, because it seems like a bad pun to me. I’m hoping they just happened to coincide this year. But still….
The general idea behind composting is to take vegetable and fruit scraps, pack them away in a dark place for a while, and voila! you have wonderful, nutritious compost that you can use to fertilize plants in the garden. What could be easier?
At our house, we excel at some of the steps.
Create fruit and veggie scraps? No problem. We generate a ton of peels, ends, tops, and rinds.
Collect the aforementioned scraps? Still no problem. We sometimes fill multiple containers in a day.
Deposit the scraps in a dark place? We are so on it! (And by “we” I mean Dad. He does an outstanding job of taking the scraps out to the compost bin.)
Leave the aforementioned scraps alone and let them decompose? Doing nothing is one of my superpowers.
Take out the wonderful, nutritious compost and fertilize plants? Um, not so much.
For reasons I can’t even begin to understand or analyze, we have the Las Vegas of compost bins: what goes into the compost bin stays in the compost bin. It must be decomposing and settling down inside the bin because the volume we’ve put in far exceeds the size of the container. Unless there’s a fourth dimension to the container…hadn’t thought about that…
“Next year” we are going to take the compost out and spread it around. Apparently, “next year” is one of those unreachable goals that moves farther away as you get closer. Remember Tantalus?
On the down side, our plants are not getting the benefit of wonderfully decomposed kitchen scraps. On the plus side, the scraps aren’t in a landfill and they aren’t in the kitchen. And I got to mention mythology.
Happy Composting!
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