Garden Prattles | In a Vermont Garden, a Gardening and Composting Blog

I must admit I did some terribly irresponsible composting at the end of the summer.  I was knee deep in the river with my children most nights and elbow deep in processed vegetables during the day and threw everything from the kitchen in the ComposTumbler.  It was so easy to toss it all in, all of it fresh fruit and vegetable waste.  With no brown material I had the slimiest, smelliest compost in my tumbler you can imagine and covered in fruit flies to boot. And I just kept adding to it.  I guess at some point I just shut down and ignored it.  But as the weather cooled and I imagined that glob frozen I came out of my stupor and dealt.  I added between rotations of the tumbler a third of a five gallon bucket of wood shavings and chopped straw that had been used as bedding in the chicken coop, but was very dry, until the tumbler was just about full.  It took four buckets of shavings.  I then turned it everyday for a couple of weeks.  The results were not so bad.  There was minimal clumping (a problem I often have when I do not add enough dry brown material), the ammonia smell was gone ( a sure sign of anaerobic decomposition) and there was almost nothing visible in its original form.

With the most lovely mild fall weather the garden chores are getting done this year and spreading the turned around compost was one of them.  My perennial beds in the front of the house get the left overs, as the vegetable garden comes first when it comes to plant food, but they needed some attention so this was for them.  Spending just a little time in the garden each day rejuvenates me.  It is seeing a droopy foxglove in the waning sun or the shiny orbs of crab apples dangling from a branch.  I spread hay mulch in thick layers over the compost as the two younger children play in the sand box at the end of the day and then there is a tug on my leg and a bright face grins up at me.  Work is done time to go in.

This year I am able to put the tumbler away for the winter as the swine have arrived.  Three piglets- one rust, one brown, one pink, named Bales, Sticks and Bricks.  Pigs eat compost material and everything else.  It is wonderful for waste management, especially for those half eaten PB and J sandwiches and barely touched dinners.  If my children only knew that the vegetables they hid under the rim of their plates were actually going to turn into bacon!  Wow!  It is an unsettling thought, but becoming less so as we get more comfortable with the farm that we are creating.  For the time being they are awfully cute.