Not just another pretty face.

Meg likes to tease me whenever I do something smart. "You're not just another pretty face" she'll say. On our first weekend in the garden it became a sort of running joke every time she made a suggestion and discovered I had already done exactly whatever that suggestion was.

-----------

Composting is a hobby I'd like to start, especially as it would directly enhance our overall gardening experience. For years I've thrown away the tops of strawberries, the skins of potatoes and carrots, the rinds of melon, egg shells, coffee grinds and the outer leaves of cabbages and heads of lettuce. All of these products would be perfect for compost. I have no idea how to officially compost my foods but I'm sure that I can Yahoo it and find the answers.

What I've done so far is to simply turn a 5 gallon plastic bucket into my composter and added some soil from our garden that I sifted to remove the rocks and twigs. Then I added some leaves that have been sitting in a pile in our driveway for the last few years after our neighbor raked the driveway and then simply left them there to rot, which is essentially a compost pile all of its own, but I'm not sure what else ended up in that pile so I'm mostly leaving it where it is and just stole some crusty brown leaves off the top. I added a few worms to help the process and for the past few days I've been throwing in the parts of the fruits and vegetables that we haven't eaten (or cooked) along with some egg shells and coffee grinds.

In the last year of the Tea house we had purchased a single auger style juicer. We had the intention of adding some freshly squeezed juices to our menu, but the one we bought takes about 10 minutes to make 8oz of juice. So our juicer ended up at the house instead of the shop. Now, I would love to tell you that I am the kind of guy that makes his own juice every day but the reality is that this thing sits under the counter way back in the corner where no one ever can reach it and you'd have to pull everything else out from under the counter first just to get at it. And half the parts have been sitting under the sink with the cleaning chemicals and bug sprays.

Today the juicer has become part of my composting effort. Instead of simply adding the unused parts of the fruit  and veggies we eat to the bucket, I'm now running them through the juicer first, which rips them apart into tiny shreds and simultaneously removes the juices so I'm not adding too much wet substance into my bucket.

It's true... I'm not just another pretty face.