by piqaboo » Tue Apr 29, 2008 3:44 pm
We have two compost heaps going on, the past couple years.
The house came with three raised beds. The soil in those beds is impermeable to water. Put it in a pot, put water on top, watch dry soil flow out like water. Soak it - water finds one narrow channel, rest of soil remains dry. Horrible stuff.
So, kitchen scraps have been going into one or the other of those beds, the past two years. Fly control has been by covering the scraps with dirt. Cant tell if the soil is any better yet - it doesnt look better.
For now, I'll keep using those beds for convenient close-to-house composting.
Down the bottom of the garden is a heap o' trimmings, grass, etc. Unfortunately, we included torn up iceplant in this pile from the getgo. The stems rot but slowly slowly, and meantime they form a tangle which makes that heap hard to turn, and thus hard to get compost off the bottom.
I used to put food scraps in this heap but that changed:
1) too lazy to hike out to it (during the few Altoid-free moments I could)
2) the food invited in rodents, and the rodents invited in rattlesnakes, and the desired population of those in our yard is 0.
This summer, we'll start a new heap, without that error. (In theory, we'll be able to mulch iceplant and add it to the heap, but I have doubts about the ability of a mulcher to handle the stuff).
Altoid - curiously strong.
)
