My new composting wound
For years, my wife has been complaining that I hog too much of our closet with clothes I never wear. So finally I’m going through all my old duds and lots of them, frankly, are not even worth giving away. But why throw them in the trash? Most of the pants I’m getting rid of are 100 percent cotton. I have the perfect final resting place for them: my compost pile.
Anything that once was alive can be composted. Last year I composted my favorite straw garden hat after years of devoted service. We’ve also composted our guinea pig (it was already dead) as well as dryer lint. Cotton fabic is a perfect candidate for composting. So I spent a couple of hours cutting a stack of pants into pieces (removing the zippers, buttons and–dare I say it?–elastic waist bands). Whenever I got tired of snipping, I’d walk another pile of cotton scraps out to the compost heap and douse it with water. I would call this a perfect “brown” material, to go with all the weeds and plant debris I’ve been pulling out of my vegetable beds for spring planting.
But I did so much cutting, I ended up with a blister on one of my fingers. My wife said I was using the wrong pair of scissors and switched them out for another that fit more comfortably.
You can see my wound in the photo above. See what us composting nuts will do for our soil?
We are engaging the concerns of a hungry planet--slowly--right here in our kitchen garden in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House.
I’d always heard that composting meat (the guinea pig) was a big no-no. How do you go about doing that?
Going out to milk the goat this early a.m., I was so happy to see the steaming heap of compost out in the far garden! A little (okay, not so little in terms of compost piles as it’s 5′ tall) volcano.
I want to compost MYSELF, and I tell my husband that all the time.
Todd, it’s not that meat won’t compost, just that you risk attracting strange things (and possibly odors) to your pile if you put meat in it. On the farm, they throw dead chickens and all sorts of stuff into the compost. But hold your nose. A dead guinea pig is more like a ball of fur than a piece of meat and quickly becomes food for the worms.
El, steam from the compost pile is always a wonderful sight. But careful what you wish for. We’ll all be compost soon enough.