Wednesday, August 4, 2010

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I leave the occasional comment over at the Archdruid's green wizardry effort . . . .


Today's theme . . . . compost.


Because we haven't been doing a kitchen garden, we have been able to be pretty generous with our scraps. Yes we get a wheelbarrow of good dirt out of the compost heap now and then, but it accumulates slowly. That's mostly because the annelids and microbes only seem to get what the neighbors don't swipe. That is, the stuff we discard gets taken by (or as I like to think, "transformed into") crows, jays, raccoons, deer, coyotes, vultures, wasps, flies, and I suspect, fishers, mice and salamanders. Dragonflies, phoebes, red-shouldered hawks, garter snakes and so on hang around -- as though it were some sort of little Serengeti waterhole -- to snap up the unwary visitors. 

Earlier, when I thought about becoming more dependent on the garden, and protecting my compost a bit from the their depredations, I kind of regretted the unneighborly attitude that goes along with gardening -- kill the bugs, harass the woodchuck, fence out the deer -- but now I'm thinking that if I gardened more, I would just have more compost to share!
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