A Road Less Travelled

There are several blogs I follow and periodically there will be a post where the author is simply geeking out about some hobby or other. Often times those posts are only intelligible if you know something about the hobby and only interesting, well, if you’re interested. So now I guess it’s my turn. I just wish I had a more interesting hobby.

Last year Crystal decided that we needed to start gardening in earnest and spent quite a lot of time growing vegetables in our backyard. Going out into her yard and getting food is very exciting for her. My contribution to the gardening cause was mostly in the form of doing Crystal’s inside chores so she could be outside with one important exception. I was in charge of the compost.

Not because anyone put me in charge. Oh no, it was all my idea and I was glad to do it. I became the compost police making sure that no biological matter went into the garbage except for approved exceptions. Whenever I went out to empty the compost container into the bin I would check on how well everything was rotting. It was somewhere in the middle of summer that I realized that composting had moved from a chore to a hobby.

I did some research on what makes good compost, I stirred my compost and I talked to anyone who would listen about how nicely everything was rotting. I was on the lookout for new things to compost and excited when I found new supplies of things to rot. At the end of the season I scrounged a second container so that what we’d accumulated throughout the summer could rest over the winter, but even then I had to stop composting during the winter because it wasn’t rotting fast enough and we’d run out of room. It got cold and snowy and my compost bins sat at the back of the yard looking lonesome.

When the thaw finally came I went out to see how far they’d gotten. The one I’d been filling looked pretty much like food going bad, but the other one, the one that was resting over the winter, looked like dirt. It was so weird. That’s how it’s supposed to look and I was hoping it would get there eventually, but when it did I was all surprised. And excited.

This year I’m doing more in the garden because Crystal is, how you say?, great with child. I went out today and got a garden bed ready and planted spinach. I got to spread some of my so-pretty compost and plant stuff in it! Soon that container will be empty and I’ll be able to fill it with more junk that will turn into dirt. Plus, when we eat stuff out of the garden there will always be bits we can’t eat so I’ll put that into the compost and it will turn into dirt and we’ll use it to grow more stuff to compost!

I’m very excited (can you tell?), but I wouldn’t recommend composting as a good hobby. It’s very hard to get other people interested in it. I mean, you probably only read this blog post because it was there and the other pages were taking too long to load. I’m surprised you made it all the way to the end. I should probably reward you with some big finish. Yep, that would be the nice thing to do.