Anyone who knows me will tell you that I would compost my grandmother.
Some use cast-off garbage cans; mine come from Arlington County’s composting program ($10 apiece), which recycles old wheeled trash bins that way.
Ann, my partner in life, are the alleyway scrounges of the neighborhood. Dusk and dawn, we can be seen examining cast-off stuff. It falls into four categories:
- Living Plants (bulbs and even shrubs)
- Dead plants (Compost
- Furniture (This wealthy neighborhood provides a constant supply of old pieces, simply cast aside by elderly retirees who are downsizing).
- Firewood.
I grew up in large families (the eldest of seven). She logged years as a graduate student. We both have that sense of limited resources grown in our bones.
Anyone who purports to garden and doesn’t compost is a punk. But in city gardens and suburban must keep rats in mind. My neighbor’s English ivy until recently harbored a family of Norway rats, who used our composter as a shelter from the cold.
And it helps in managing nitrate runoff .
DC’s Department pf Parks and Recreation holds composting workshops in spring and summer to teach residents how to start composting.
Fee: $5.00 per person - includes class materials and instruction
Arlington (where I live) says just don’t put animal products (you know, bones and crab shells and eggshells) in there
The last remaining nagging non-compostable thing for my neighbor Ira is the pesky wine cork. (He doesn’t drink that much, but some of his friends do—and every one of them drops things off for his .) They are too tough. Ira has found that, you can use them as orchid medium, if you chop them into pieces.
I myself made the breakthrough of dropping one into the blender, then hitting “pulse/grate. It took a while, he said.
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