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Wednesday, July 25, 2012
What rot
Readers of this blog will know that compost is a subject/substance dear to my heart. After a session of pond cleaning, pea and bean harvesting, comfrey pulling, peony pruning and hellebore hacking, as well as the ever-ongoing, never-concluding war-on-weeds, I thought the bins were looking particularly luscious and lovely, just on the cusp of decay.
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14 comments:
As a compost lover myself, I must say mine never looks this lush and lovely. Must be the gorgeous plants you've cleaned up from your garden, and captured before too much decay.
The aroma of a working compost pile is unexpectedly pleasant.
Ours never looked very attractive, it was mostly tea bags and rotten banana skins! Unfortunately we had to stop composting for a little while as we had no more space in our little garden to store the compost we were producing >.<
Hmm. To be picky, I think I prefer photos of flowers...
i love how you find beauty in the most unexpected places. what is the mysterious looking white slice in one of the seventh photo? is it a lemon? something exotic? i need to know!
The flesh tones of the first four pictures are strangely unsettling - beautiful, but unsettling!
What lovely garbage you have. Wish mine was so. Why no bugs -- or did I miss something?
I suspect the bugs and worms are not far behind.
SWMBO, after her recent patio project, said her mind keeps dreaming up physical tasks that her body is no longer willing to cooperate with. I hope your hard day's work was topped with a nice bottle or two of good wine!
Oh, yes...luscious and lovely, indeed!
that looks very nice compost! It's such wonderful stuff...
A famous composter, you might say a Bach among composters, devised I recall a compost heap accellerator of which the chief ingredient was comfrey. I can't remember her name, but you used to be able to buy the stuff in packets from garden and hardware stores.
Noble rot, perhaps. Better still - ennobled rot.
Only you could post such elegant photos of compost!
Thanks all.
No of course it doesn't always look this nice, it had just had a lot of fresh stuff, including the water-lily leaves from the pond, and a shower of rain, so it was looking rather glossy and colourful.
Zhoen - yes, it usually smells OK, good when it has plenty of grass cuttings. The kitchen waste, which begins in a bin on straw with a charcoal filter in the kitchen, can smell a bit sour.
Chloe - too much compost can be a problem - we have open bins at the bottom of the garden with really big prunings and stuff which can get a bit much. Tea bags and eggshells we don't compost, they don't seem to break down well. Coffee grouts with straw are good. Banana skins are brilliant!
Isabelle - you've got flowers there, comfrey ones! Anyway, no flowers without decay...
Polish - It's the end of a lemon!
Dick - yes, that's the water lily leaves, they have rather strange fleshy texture and tones.
Anne - as I say, it's not usually so attractive. The bugs are there, but mostly under the surface, the red worms are very busy. It doesn't seem to attract too many flies, sometimes those very small ones, the bigger ones are busy annoying the cows in the field or us in the house.
Cat - a bottle or two after every day's gardening and I'd rapidly be a hopeless dypso and incapable of doing any gardening or anything else! It is nice to relax after hard work though; I try not to flog myself all day on any one task, though, or it gets discouraging. It's a work without completion however. Good luck to SWMBO in her projects!
Plutarch - we have a large patch of Bocking hybrid comfrey - it will spread from the roots but doesn't seed itself so is less invasive than the wild stuff - next to the compost bins so one can always grab an armful and apply it - that's what the purple flowers are. Tom gets a bit exasperated by it but I love it, as do the bees, especially the small tricolour bumblebees of which there has been a colony down the garden this year - I had to avoid cutting the grass there for a while as it distressed them. I rather like comfrey fritters too, but they're really just a vehicle for batter and sugar, and they say we perhaps shouldn't eat too much comfrey anyway. The tea is supposed to be pleasant, cucumberish of course so probably a good blend with mint. I'll try it later!
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