I had the chance to do a guest post on the always entertaining Garden Rant:
“As I emptied buckets of human waste into a bin filled with red wigglers, the realization hit me: I had reached peak compost.
This was it. Eggshells and hair were just gateway drugs.
Later I got into the hard stuff: moldy lasagna, spoiled stew, roadkill… And now here I was in the freezing cold, feeding sewage to hungry worms living in a derelict fridge-turned-compost-bin filled with espresso grounds, office paper shreds, produce stand wastes, the neighbor’s leaves and beautiful, amazing humus-in-progress.
I had arrived.
I don’t know about you, but I get sick of all the publications telling us what we CAN’T compost. Nature composts almost everything, right? If a bear leaves a dropping in the woods, does someone come along and put it in a landfill? When a possum gets nailed on the railroad tracks, does Mother Nature show up with gloves, bleach and plastic bags to take the corpse away?
Nope.
Yet here we are, making lists all the time. “No paper! No oils! No meat!” And then we go out and buy fertilizer and compost for our gardens…”
Also, The Survival Gardener was just added to the list of the Best Gardening Blogs and Websites on the Internet over at EpicGardening.com – you can see that list here.
He has some other good site suggestions I have been checking out.
7 responses to “Quit Throwing Out the Scary Stuff: Compost It Instead!”
Praise well deserved David the Good
Thank you. It’s sometimes more of a “hey – look over here! See my site!?” kind of a thing. I haven’t shown up on many of the top garden site lists despite having good traffic. I probably need some shock troops going around the net posting my stuff.
“Hey, Better Homes & Gardens – you need to publish something from David The Good! Oh, you don’t like articles on fermenting urine and fish guts? Fine – then we’re going RIGHT to Southern Home! You’re gonna miss out!”
Dave, guys like you and I use reason and logic, we ask questions like “Why? ” and “Why not?”. It makes people uncomfortable, because it’s easy to go with the flow. I’m sorry, but “Because.” is not a sufficient enough answer, as I must why. It makes me very hard to live with sometimes. Sorry, not sorry. Keep it up, it’s why I follow everything you do. Non-conformerst unite! (I might have gone a little far. Sorry,not sorry…..again.)
I’ll be wearing my ‘Compost Your Enemies’ shirt at the Mother Earth News Fair next month.
That is utterly fantastic.
I found this out almost by accident in the FL sand-pit where we live. I’ve been gradually building a garden by digging a pit, throwing in a layer of charcoal, and then dumping in all the kitchen scraps until it was full. Then our drains started going glug glug glug, and the pattern of plant growth in the septic drainfield changed markedly– looks like a partial drainfield failure, but we can’t afford to replace it yet :/ So we are nursing the septic system along by using our charcoal pits for greywater processing, too. We haul the greasy dishwater out in buckets and dump it in with the kitchen scraps. Next thing you know, urine was going there too, and boiled chicken skins, and dead fish carcasses I hauled home from the beach. When each pit is full, I cap it with another layer of charcoal (I’ve started adding animal bones to the burn barrel), throw on some mulch and topsoil, and plant something. We’ve had some nice lettuces and sunflowers this year, and the cherry tomatoes are just coming in, sweet and delicious. Pretty good for white quartz sand! Not quite brave enough to start throwing poop in there– I’m nervous about not being able to get far enough from the well on our lot– but I’m kind of obsessed with not letting usable nutrients leave the property in trash bags now.
This is fantastic – thank you. It works!