Compost

People spend large portions of their lives perfecting the making of compost. Do you use worms or bins. Layers or boxes, Garden clippings? Leaves? Kitchen scraps?  Coming from a completely urban setting, we have a rather casual attitude toward compost. At first we collected all our kitchen scraps, except for the ones with protein, and all the spent plants from the raised beds and dumped them onto a pile enclosed by a portable wire fence to keep the dogs out. Whenever he thought of it, OilMan would turn the pile and water it. As time went along, we realized that some things, like avocado pits and corn cobs have a hundred year half-life, so we stopped putting them in. 

After a year or so, OilMan had some nice crumbly rich looking soil which he mixed in with bags of soil purchased from the nursery to put in his veggie boxes.  This led me to wonder why we bothered at all with all the palaver needed to make compost. But OilMan gets some kind of satisfaction out of it and since he does almost all of the gardening, including carrying buckets of kitchen scraps up 25 steps to the compost pile, I don't question his composting choices.

After the first year, the veggie boxes with the compost added began producing numerous volunteers...zinnias, sunflowers, tomatoes and tomatillos. Many tomatillos. It stands to reason that if you put plants with seeds in your compost pile, the seeds will sprout. Everywhere.

It turns out that if you don't want to have volunteers coming up everywhere, you have to create heat in your compost pile. I don't really know how that is done, but a sign in Acre coffee says they have buckets full of coffee grounds which are excellent for compost piles. Really? Now we have to bring home other people's garbage to enhance our little buckets of kitchen scraps. What's wrong with the bags of soil from the nursery? Some of them even claim to have compost in them.

I rather like the serendipity of volunteer plants. The best tomato plant we ever grew was a volunteer growing straight out of our rocky soil. And we both like the tomatillo plant growing over the rock wall next to our driveway....