Your weekly update on our adventures in composting!
Today marks the conclusion of another great weekend working in the garden…and, another successful Sunday’s in St. Roch (as we’ve been dubbed among the composting community)!
Today I was working in the garden for most of the weekly drop off hours and got to see a new face, among some now familiar faces. I always try to remember to offer seedlings, but alas no takers today. We collected one bin worth of food waste and our compost bin in nearly full! Upon further inspection, it appears roughly the same height as it was last week, so perhaps with decomposition we have room to keep filling before we move on to our second compost bin. Needless to say, I’m very pleased with the arrangements we made last week and feel comfortable with our current two bin system, for now.
The highlight of the afternoon (other than spotting some pumpkin seeds popping up and admiring growth among all the plants) was after locking all the bins up receiving a late comer to the site. The retired couple that live here part time and stay in Portland the rest of the year honked me out of my garden daze and asked if I didn’t mind that they were late. I did not mind at all, obviously. What was more interesting was the sincere gratitude that was our expressed by the pair. They were genuinely excited and relieved that they could still drop off their compost despite being a couple minutes late. I was stunned by it, and so happy to feel like we are “offering” something perhaps bigger than I’ll ever fully comprehend.
I’m so pleased that we can give people an avenue to do good things for Mother Earth. On the way to setting up I walked with the family, my husband drove the stroller, I had some eggshells and my wheelbarrow in tow. Tomorrow is trash day so along the route we picked up cardboard that would otherwise not have been recycled. We filled up the wheelbarrow (I’m sure we are quite a sight to our neighbors) and after a little bit of energy spent tearing off tape and stickers, we used it all as a bottom layer for mulch. We didn’t have to do this today, but today is compost day, so we figured, why not?
If you’re on the fence about recycling and/or composting your food waste might I suggest taking this approach, asking yourself, “why not?”. It’s such a small amount of time and makes the biggest difference, I’m glad we decided to offer this service and I can testify that every little bit can make a huge impact. We prevented another bin worth of waste from our landfills and a wheelbarrow full of cardboard that would have otherwise been trashed is now feeding the garden. That’s just what we accomplished today. I do believe the little things all add up, and I am motivated about what those little things can mean for our tomorrows.
I dig it. 