We live in Oregon which is about as “green” as you can get.  The longer you live in a place, the more you immerse yourself in the culture.  So when Rob told me he was bringing home a composter, I did not really question it. But I had no idea what was going in my yard.

This is our composter.  Most of the time it has a lid on it.  We keep it in the very back corner of the garden.

This is what we put our food waste in.  It is usually kept under the sink.  You can put just about any food waste in there as long as it is not meat or dairy.  You can even put household items in like dryer lint, paper towels, and coffee filters.  You are supposed to empty it every 2-3 days. Unfortunately, ours is currently outside airing out.  We forgot to empty it for like well over a week and it was pretty nasty.  I am not even going to show you what it looked like…trust me…it was DISGUSTING!

Once your food waste turns into soil, you can lift this little latch up at the bottom of your composter and there you go–rich soil to put in your garden.  The composter comes with a guidebook of what to put in there and what to leave out.  But we did not follow it as close as we should have.  This summer we saw little green leaves growing in and around our corn.  This is where Rob spread out the soil from the composter.  We assumed the seeds from last year’s squash sprouted.  I do remember putting leftover squash in the composter last fall.  But it turned out to be…

Pumpkins!  Apparently one of us put Hailey’s Halloween pumpkin in the composter and the seeds sprouted and took over our garden.  So our corn now looks like this…No corn for us this year.  Either the pumpkins stole all the nutrients from the soil or the unusually cool summer kept it from amounting to more than this.  Oh well…at least we will have pumpkins to carve in a few weeks.

Posted by artoornstra in Food & Recipes, Inside the home Tags: backyard activities, household chores, outdoors