Compost

by Dr. Mary Strate for the Hemmingford Environment Committee  (February 2014)

Does anyone enjoy examining box lunches when children return home from school? For me, it is a rare triumph when lunch bags are returned empty. Sandwiches shunned owing to lettuce lurking too near the lunchmeat; bananas mushed after being used as personal weapons; apples browned after being gnawed by bored tots; or even the dread leftovers suddenly unacceptable when classmates are near…. A peek into box lunches after school explains why children are hungry at 15h00.

What do you do with these miserable remnants of meals? Those readers who are severe ascetics with iron stomachs need not read further; I am sure you can coerce your Wee Marie to finish her lunch or else foist it off onto unsuspecting husbands not yet home. For the rest of us the task is simply to scrape the leftovers out and wash the bags anew. But what do we do with the muck formerly known as food?

Vermiculture Valhalla. After our fourth year here, I emptied the crate and rich black earth spilled out. What had formerly been nauseating was now feeding my lilies.

My ‘compost bin’ was an old puppy crate: it kept mammals out while welcoming worms. Those of you with access to the internet can read up on vermiculture at www.motherearth- news.com. Making a compost bin is simple by repurposing an old rubbish bin too.

Now that we have poultry festooning our property, we have hired chickens to do our composting. My birds get their exercise scratching through once-loved lunches leaving only tea bags, coffee grounds, and the odd banana peel. Moreover, the chickens thank us in eggs. A friend in the village brings her vegetable scraps to our house knowing that the animals here are happy to pick through novel foodstuffs. There are many sites online publishing glowing reports of homestead recycling their waste into nourishing food (through a chicken) one of them www.backyardchickens.com has an impressive series of images that demonstrate how quickly chickens can scratch through discarded foods.

How much easier can recycling get?