Show Me Your Compost Neo!

Submitted by Evelyn Kiefer on Fri, 03/20/2009 - 00:33.


I am starting a compost pile in my yard. I have a pile of yard and kitchen waste already from last year which I have not turned but I watered it well and it is nicely decomposing. I am trying to decide what type of bin I should buy or build -- so many options and then there are the worms too. I hope to become a master composter in a few seasons.

How do YOU compost? 

 

 

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Compost me

  I know that this is a gory, gruesome thought, but Sandor Katz mentioned at his presentation that he wants to be buried sans casket and, when he dies, hopes to be compost as soon as possible. 

He also noted that Tennessee is the only state in the union that allows home burials.  We need to discuss the cyle of life and death with kids.  So many of the kids I know think that you can be shot and you will just get up again.  We have no respect for life and death in America and we need to have this discussion with our kids.   In NEO, this discussion could and should turn into a solution for greening the mortuary business and land conservation through green burials.

Green Burials

Wow!  Something you don't really think about often..  You just triggered a memory I had long forgotten.. even after keeping up with the recent Ohio City Crematory zoning issue.

My grandfather has a family farm way up in the hills of West Virginia.  It is so old, a family cemetary is on site..  Even West Virginia doesn't allow you to bury those who have passed at home anymore... haven't for a very, very long time.

The burial plot is high up on a hill at the edge of a woody area and the back of the nearest grazing field.  It is surrounded with a white, picket fence, which is about chest high and each picket is carefully spaced so you can see through, but solid enough so the cows couldn't get through.  A large cross sits in the middle. 

While it was a little creepy during thunderstorms.. especially with the wooded back drop, it was also comforting having your ancestors "on site." 

We're lucky that the farm is still in the family.  With Mead/Westvaco surrounding every possible inch of land to rape the trees for paper, my grandfather hasn't sold out.  But if he did, what would happen to the graveyard?  Are there laws protecting that little space?  And, we are all so transient today..  long gone are the days when property was handed down and lived in by following generations..

don't get too carried away

with composting Evelyn - your girls will be eating most of everything but onions! and they'll act like you are giving them manna from heaven! You should see my fat white cochin, ZaZa, run across the yard when I throw out scraps - I have to get a picture of that...

The trade off is they give you a lOVely straw compost and their poopy binds the lead in the soil - turns it into an inert compound (I'm not a chemist so I have no idea what - but the lead remediation workshop covered this).