Thursday, June 25, 2009

Composting

I have officially given up on composting. I tried, I really did, for more than a year, but the environment of all things, got the best of me.
I live in an area of NY that, between June and September is either humid and hot, or raining and hot. The rest of the year it usually freezes over, so I was constantly struggling with compost that was frozen, or too wet, or infested with fungus gnats. There was never a good time for my compost bins, no matter how much brown I added to cover it up. Sure, it broke down, but what use do I have for it, if it is swarming with gnats. I am a container gardener, and while the compost would probably work in someones veggie garden in their backyard, it simply didn't work when all I had was potted herbs and some flowers.
So, I dug a hole in a corner of the backyard (I rent, and live on the second floor of a house split into 4 apartments) and dumped the compost in there, and covered it up with the dirt I had dug up. The compost that went in smelled and was buggy. Ugh! It was too hard to do it, what with living in an apartment and having very little access to workable browns (ie, grass clippings, dead leaves, hay).
Vermicomposting, while very interesting, isn't an option in this household. My fiance is openly hateful towards worms, and avoids them on sidewalks. Don't ask me why, I have no idea there. It also seemed quite difficult, to me. I was unsure where exactly I was going to be able to sort the compost without terrifying the man, and what if I missed the tiny eggs while I was sorting? Is it ok to have worms in my tiny containers? Nothing I read on the subject really shed any light on that, and I figure they're writing more towards people who have room to garden.
On that note, the worms in the bins do reproduce and grow in numbers, and what was I going to do with the excess? Give it to bait shops? Save it for the day the man pisses me off enough that I resort to covering his side of the bed with worms? I figure that would be more than I really wanted from compost.
I hope I didn't scare anyone away from composting because it really is a great way to reduce the amount of garbage that leaves your household, but in my case, it just didn't work.

No photos this time around.