compost – Garden Rat

I’ve never composted before, so this last year is the first time for me. What really worked for me was these black plastic bins from Amazon. (None of these are affiliate links. I get paid nothing if you buy anything. I just like ’em. ) I just wait until they are under $80 on sale. I hate paying full price!

They provide that green compost turner hanging on the back wall, but it’s not good. It took too much yanking on my bad collarbone joint to work well.

Instead I got an overpriced spiral version on Amazon. I guess I am getting old because I resent spending $50 on basically a chunk of spiral metal. It works though. Really well, so I guess it’s worth the money.

This is far easier on my bad joints. I can twist it in, and yank it back out easily, turning the compost. Now I can do it when I want, not when my joints are good enough to do it. That’s a nice change.

I literally only turn it about once a week, when I take my table scraps out. I’m just not that dedicated. I do use my big paper shredder to shred Amazon boxes to mix in. I just don’t have browns at all if I don’t use paper and amazon boxes. The shredder was about $250, and says it won’t do cardboard, but I have been doing great with it. I am pretty impressed that I can compost like 75% of all my own cardboard. I still get overwhelmed with it, but it feels good to not dispose of so much.

I didn’t do any fancy compost calculations. I just tossed in about roughly 50% browns and 50% greens. I didn’t expect it to work so well due to my laziness, but I was wrong.

Today was the best part. I turned my compost, and it was filled with happy worms.

I am super excited about that. When spring comes I think it will be ready to spread on my beds. I won’t have to pay for Lowe’s compost!

I have also learned that what I think will be a lot, really isn’t. The bin was filled to the very tip top in October, and now it’s broken down to so little. I had dumped some of my greens into the yard waste bin for the city to pick up, but now that I know how much it breaks down, I am not doing that again. I need that for my garden!

I bought a second one, and placed it in the corner of the yard. When the first one is done, I will move it over next to the corner one. I think I need a third now that I know what I am doing. I need enough room to fill like two of them, and let one of them just age. I think they will look nice there all in a row.

As an aside, you can also see the clover coming in around the grass clumps. The entire yard is like that. It started as a garbage dump of trash dirt and clumps of dying scrub grass, but the clover seems very hardy. I hope by year two, it will have spread all over.

My next plan is the garden cage. I need to cover it with squirrel proof hardware cloth. My Squirrel Interdiction Cage failed spectacularly. None of my overwinter ideas are going to happen because the squirrels dug up literally everything. Including the rhubarb! Lesson learned! Squirrels can fit through chicken wire!

I am going to see about starting that process in February, when I have a little more light to work by. It’s getting dark before 5pm, and after work I just don’t have enough. When I do have a day off, it’s full of rain and I am not doing it in the rain.

When I start I will keep posting about my progress, though.

My compost pile is being held hostage by yellow jackets.

My back yard is bordered by a retaining wall made of railroad ties. Somewhere around August, a yellow jacket hive set up shop behind some of the ties, literally next to my compost bin. I am thinking the blueberry syrup waste I tossed in there made it an attractive neighborhood. I have also since learned they are aggressive little bastards in late summer by nature.

I discovered this when I tossed some compost in the pile and was going to mix it in, and I got stung. I thought, no big deal, I would call Orkin, who I had a contract with, to come deal with it. First, I learned that my Orkin contract only covers the house, and I’d have to pay a couple hundred bucks to deal with the nest, and they’d have someone call me. After a month of trying to contact them I gave up, cancelled my contract, and decided to DIY it. I don’t need to pay for a service that ghosts me.

The first time I sprayed them with a single can of spray, early in the pre-dawn light, they came flying out of there like they were shot out of a bee cannon, and I got stung on the nose, flung myself backwards, and hit the ground. I was about five feet away, but had to finish spraying from about 15 feet away after I got stung. This seemed to kill a lot of them off, but there were still bees a couple weeks later.

I hope my back neighbors got the entire event on their Arlo camera that they have pointed at my yard. Someone should get some humor out of it. I feel like it was a flappy “OMG a bee is on me” dance that probably did not showcase what little grace and dexterity I actually have.

So then I bought six cans of spray and my wife and I went out. My wife has ADHD, which might explain while I was spraying the hive area, I noticed my wife spraying down the length of the retaining wall in a loopy pattern with the bug spray. She seemed to be enjoying herself, so why not?

This is kind of a thing for her. I once asked her to help me shave my backside, you know, as one does when they transition and realize that butt hair is the fastest and thickest incoming masculine hair you are getting. I realized after getting into a fairly compromising position in the bathtub that she was shaving down my thigh, and I had to ask her why?

So I am not sure, but I think targets are a little murky for her, and I am going to say that might be ADHD related, but it could also just be a quirk my wife has.

Back to the yellow jacket eradication project, we each had three cans, and I dumped my three in the crevasse with the nest, but my plans to get super close and really get in there were ruined as a half dozen bees came out while I was spraying. They weren’t bee cannon ferocious, and I sprayed them down the foaming bee spray. I felt I got a good coverage and into the hive, though.

Now, days later, I still notice a yellow jacket, here or there, coming in and out of the hive. They are still holding my composter hostage, and I can’t mix my compost.

My plan is to buy six more cans of bee spray and try again. Eventually I have to get them all, right? I am a grown ass adult, and I can keep buying bee spray until I have killed the stinging possessive bastards. I was going to move the composter to the other side of the yard this month originally, and now I have to wait until I get rid of the bees.

So Bees 3, me 0, in the war for the composter.

Tag: compost

Composting

Garden Misadventures – Yellow Jacket Apocalypse