compost mania

The composting has finally begun!!! Here is a photo of my beautiful pile (after ten minutes to upload it). Mom and Rich built my compost structure yesterday out of brand new pallet (mom knos someone), so today I got busy layering shredded paper, grass clippings, food scraps, and some weeds.

It is about time too, bc I have been saving kitchen scraps all week and had three full containers plus Karrie's. Some of them were a bit slimy and gross. Hopefully the worms will like it.

Mom had pulled up a whole pile of weeds earlier in the spring before I got home, but felt bad about putting them in the burn pile bc there was so much good soil clumped in the roots. I think this is the perfect starter for my compost.

I love the paper shredder, so I have been happily ripping the plastic windows out of the envelopes and shredding everything i can possibly get my hands on - toilet paper tubes, junk mail, the inserts in magazines, everything! Today Mike and his pirate uncle tried to convince me that I needed to take the napkins and paper placemats left over from our lunch. I told them I was not that much of a fanatic. (I think they disagreed.)

Everyone seems to be keen to help me with my compost pile too. Everyone has told me how easy it is, "ÿou just do "blah blah blah." The problem is the blah-blah-blah part is all different advice and often contradictory. Oh well. I am going to go with the advice from howtocompost.com (and the eight million other hits that pop up when you google how to compost) and see how it goes.

Everyone also seems to want to contribute to my pile - weeds, kitchen scraps, newspapers. Maybe I will inspire my neighbors to build their own. Or I will have a HUGE neighborhood compost pile. Here it goes!