Living Waterside

Based on some very constructive feedback about my questionable composting practices of throwing various garden products into the woods, I am compelled to explain my composting theories.

First, I am a compulsive recycler. We have single stream recycling (yeah!) which means that I can pretty much throw any recyclable into the blue bin and some nice person takes it away every Tuesday. I am conscientious enough to rinse out anything that had food in it, but to be fair, it’s because I don’t want ants in the house, not really because it’s the right thing to do. I recycle my shredded paper, toilet paper rolls (after the dog has thoroughly chewed them), double side printed paper (why waste one side??), and the wide variety of newspaper, magazines, and junk mail that seem to inundate the house daily (thank goodness Victoria’s Secret has not found me waterside, because they were good for a catalog a day!). I pitch cans, bottles, plastics, and bubble wrap (yep, it’s recyclable). We even throw in wire hangers (No More Wire Hangers, Joan Crawford) and Ziploc bags (clean ones). We have separate trashcans throughout the house just for recycling. Here I am, helping the planet. Go Earth!

Then I started wondering about what to do with the extra food we have. Not just garden produce, but the stuff that sits in the refrigerator just a little too long and starts growing penicillin on it. I’d heard of composting, and seen the giant pile of grass clippings that the yard guy leaves in a pile week after week, as well as the giant piles of rich dirt at the dump (yes, we have a dump nearby – it’s so cool to take stuff there – no smelly trash, just big stuff and compost materials – it’s where old refrigerators and TVs and batteries go to die). So I start saving extra food on the counter (no chicken or meat because that would grow stuff way worse than penicillin, just vegetable and fruit scraps), and I start throwing them in the woods.

To note, we live on 4 acres, 2+ of which is woods, so it’s not like I’m throwing it in the yard or anything…

My sweetie watches me do this a time or two before he asks, “what are you doing?” to which I reply, “composting!” He’s not convinced as he explains all I’m really doing is leaving food out for the Thumpers and Bambis who like to visit the yard. And those are the last two pests I want to encourage to become repeat visitors after the tulip debacle this past spring. I petulantly explain that these things will decompose and go back to nature, where they came from. He patiently explained that long before they compost, local rodents and pests that require large no-kill traps to relocate to other smarter people’s yards would eat them. So, I stopped composting.

To be fair, I felt bad throwing away food scraps that could easily become the rich soil that I used in my super productive garden. At the same time, the composted dirt at the dump was free, so other than a little gasoline for the truck (ok, a lot of gasoline for the truck, because it gets like 5 MPG) and some labor (mostly my sweetie’s labor, since I beg off manual labor because of a variety of injuries – real and imagined), we could have awesome dirt for the price of a gallon or two of gas and breakfast in bed.

Then came the garden overabundance and I found myself not wanting to bring the cornucopia of vegetables back to the house because they were going to take up more counter space and I was going to have to make more pickles/salsa/spaghetti sauce. I started throwing them into the woods and occasionally into the water. I sneaked it at first, going to the garden when I was the only one home, with only the dog and cat to witness me throwing a tomato like a girl (well, what do you expect, I am a girl). Sometimes I would cart the mother load of productivity up to the house and rinse it, only to creep over to the edge of the woods and hurl the cucumbers of pornographic proportions into the side woods, justifying that they weren’t going to taste good anyway, and frankly they were a bit intimidating in their length and girth.

Yes, my fancy composting consists of throwing perfectly good vegetables into the woods, where they are probably eaten by the same pests I have put up fences to deter. I hope that some may compost and return their nutrient rich bounty to nature. However, now I have a fear that as they start to compost, their seeds will embed themselves in the ground and find a way to grow and this garden project will take on a new life of it’s own – gardening in the wild.