Don't pay big bucks for a Composter!

Kristi, this one's for you!

Someone in my Meetup Group was inquiring about the different compost systems our members use. I was going to just snap a photo of mine and email it to her, but I figured it would make for good blog fodder, too!

I'll show you mine if you show me yours....!

Everything I have heard is that expensive tumblers are stinky, rotten, and don't hold enough! These are super cheap, work like a dream! I have had them for 4 years now, they are expandable to up to 4 ft in diameter. They were about 20.00 apiece. I am even smarter now and know that a roll of fencing is 14.00 and will make several of these, and have enough leftover for some planters! I am a lazy composter - I rarely turn it but there is enough air that they never stink, yet enough is kept out that they heat up nicely. Super easy to take care of, rather than turning it, I just yank it off, place it on the ground a few feet away, and fork it all back in, voila - compost is turned!

We used recycled fence boards from the last hurricane blowdown to build this little baby. Hubby got to drill holes and pound rebar into the ground and stacked the boards, with enough leftover to serve as a cover. While a pain to turn compost in, we use it instead as a place to store our compost that is "ready" in. We can keep out the rain so it doesn't wash any beneficial stuff out, yet it can breathe due to the board spacing vertically. Whenever I need some, I just shovel it out of this.

More food for thought: I have used vinyl fencing and a piece of drainage pipe I scored as potato cages, but these could just as easily be compost bins!

We have already seen your forks, so now let's see your compost bins, everyone!

Knee deep in a good harvest this evening, will update later!

Dumpster Diving on Easter Sunday???

So you wanna know how we spend Easter Sunday when the husband is gone and no family live near???  Dumpster Diving of course!  More to come on that in a minute.  The kids started the day with the obligatory Egg Hunt...as you can see below as they jaunt through the garden baskets in hand in 38 degree weather.  I am pet-sitting at someone's house this weekend, so in order to get there in time for the morning routine I had to wake them up at 6:45.  I told them "on your feet!  be dressed, pottied, teeth brushed, at the back door with baskets in hand in 10 minutes!"  I have never seen them move so fast.  Hmmm, even Finnegan didn't even ask me to button pants, wipe his butt for him, find his shirt, etc, etc!  There was candy involved, so no intervention was needed from me - awesome start to the day!  And lucky for me, they did indeed return with baskets full of eggs with candy inside!  (lucky since the thought occurred to me while I was finding my way through the dark with a flashlight hiding eggs last night that there was probably several "wild things" watching me and waiting to come snatch them!)

Okay, so I'm done with the whole "you're doing an egg hunt for them, aren't you?!"  Check that off my list of things that proper moms do for their kids.  What to do next?  I don't really want to do the park thing since I really have a lot of work to do in my garden and don't want to deal with crowds of people at the playground.  Let's go for a DRIVE...so I took the kids to a very new and affluent neighborhood (read no trees, foreclosed homes, sale signs everywhere) and ... what do we have here?  On the curb of a house with a foreclosed sign on it sat 2 very large crate-type wooden boxes.  They scream "take me, don't let us go to the landfill!"  So I parked the Outback, slid the front seat back until Finn's legs were jammed up in his chin, and proceeded to lift one into the front seat, one in the way back.  These babies weighed about 80 lbs apiece, and Lochlann just kept repeating "maybe you should wait for daddy..."  

So when we got home, I rolled them into the back yard and gave the kids paint and brushes and told them to have at 'em.  They had a blast and this is what I got - these may be perfect for my new colonnade apple trees!

I also forgot to mention Charlie's project completed right before he left for AZ.  We had a ton of old fence boards from the old fence that I really wanted recycled into SOMETHING.  He drilled holes in them and slipped them all onto rebar pounded into the ground.  Presto, I have a 2 bay compost bin that is aerated and looks a heck of a lot better than my 2 plastic black ones (which I will still use, but hide behind the shed!).  

The final project only took a half hour and is pretty cute.  We dug out an old wheelbarrow that was destined for the dump due to the huge gashes in the bottom of it - we then spraypainted it (all we had of course was aircraft gray, courtesy of my Navy jet-mech husband) and filled it with compost, a plant, some old pots we intend to put herbs in, and a $1 sign from Target I had laying around.  Charlie is going to laugh when he gets home and sees this one because I kept rescuing that wheelbarrow from his "to the dump" pile.  Every time he would say "what are you going to do with THAT?".  (The plant we put in looks pretty bad, it was planted in the shade the other day and it obviously needs to be in the sun - I hope it recovers).  I must admit after all this activity I was eyeing our canoe and thinking it might look good with a couple of rows of corn in it...no, I better draw the line on this one before I turn into "the crazy lady"...

I won't win any mother of the year awards for their diets today (see menu below!), and I conned them big time by giving them paint that kept them busy ALL DAY :), but I think they had fun and I got alot of work done!  

Here's the crap that was consumed today at my house:

Breakfast:  Candy

Snack :  English Muffin & Scrambled Egg (ok, that wasn't bad)

Lunch:  Plain Cheeseburger from McD's (ugh!)

Snack:  More Candy

Dinner:  Quesadilla and pretzels...more candy

Before you think I am horrible, I will say that is a definite deviation from what is normally served around here, and those who know me won't believe it, but my floors are even dirty today...REALLY DIRTY!  I don't even care...I can go back to being OCD mom tomorrow...

HAPPY EASTER EVERYONE!