Composting

With that, you can turn around your compost a lot quicker than I can, but I deposit everything compostable from what would otherwise go in the trash, as well as leaves and tree trimmings.

 

No, as I explained earlier, I don't use my compost for gardening. Here in Millinocket, most of the houses were built on wet ground that was filled in by coal ash from the paper mill that was built here before the town. There was once a pond where my house is and, before the town was built, the mill dumped its coal ash, which was a byproduct of the mill procedures, to form the land that the old part of town was built. Then the dumped a little bit of soil on top of that and built houses. Because of this, if I dig down only a few inches into the soil, I hit coal ash. Some trees are able to root through the coal ash, but some aren't. I can't grow root crops, like potatoes or celery, unless I build raised gardens. So, what I am using my compost for is to build up the height of the ground in my yard. Because I'm not using it in gardens, and because I have enough space to let it compost for three years, I compost everything, including cat litter and meat scraps. As you probably know, it take a whole lot of scraps to yield a small amount of compost.

 

A couple of weeks ago, I added several tree branches that I had trimmed from my trees and that's holding the pile up right now. Although I cut them into small pieces, it's keeping the pile from dropping down. Before too long, I think that weight of the stuff added later will compress it, though. Also, I must have missed a large section of styrofoam from one of the boxes that I added, because I see that in there, near the bottom, now that the box has composted around it. Once things settle a bit, I'll try to dig that out.


Although it hardly looks like a well manicured lawn, this spring I was faced with rust-colored moss all over my lawn. Last year, it was green moss and looked pretty okay so I didn't do anything with it, but this year it was ugly. I pulled up as much of that as I could and re-seeded. Then I made the mistake of adding fertilizer and, where in spots where I added too much of it, I had dead spots, so I dug up the soil from these spots, replacing it with a mixture of top soil and compost, and re-seeded them. This about all the lawn maintenance I plan on doing this summer, other than mowing and watering. Next spring, I'll see what I have. I might have to pull up more of the moss and the soil around it, and do some more seeding. I don't look for perfection but I wasn't exactly looking for butt ugly either.

I am going to quit putting peanuts out for the squirrels though. Although I'll continue to feed them other types of squirrel food, they keep digging holes in my lawn and gardens to bury the peanuts that I give them.

 

I hope I'm not overworking my worms this summer. I've added the brush from the trees that I have cut down over the past few days.

 

The worms are doing a pretty good job, considering that every bit of my compostable materials have been added to this pile.

 

It fascinates me that I have added everything compostable from our house (food wastes, junk mail, boxes, paper towels), as well as three bales of straw, the leaves from four trees that I cut down and, of course, the ones that I've raked up from the yard since last fall, yet the pile never gets much bigger than it is now, at least not for long. When I do heap it, everything is composed down to about this level in a short time.