The Compost Crew

We've been flying right through spring, heading toward an early summer. Or maybe there is no spring in South Carolina. It seems the daily highs somehow skipped the 70's and jumped right into the high 80s and low 90s. I'm not complaining, though. I love throwing on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt each morning and not having to worry about whether or not it'll be cool at recess. It never is.

I used the shift into warmer weather to sort out our compost a few weeks back. We keep two compost piles in the back. One is the traditional sort where we layer food scraps with other organic material. The other is a vermicompost which consists of a couple thousand red wiggler worms, shredded newspaper, and a few cups of weekly food scraps.

We used to temporarily keep our food scraps in an old margarine tub on the kitchen counter until someone took the initiative to get them outside. However, it didn't take long for the fruit flies to find their way in and before we knew it our house was full of what must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny flies. They were everywhere. We eventually had to start taking our compost straight outside. This was effective but a hassle.

A few months ago Tricia's parents sent us a countertop compost crock. It is aerated by tiny holes in the lid. A small filter fits into the lid to control the odor as well as to keep out unwanted guests. We've had very few flies since making the switch.

This has been our first real attempt at composting. Much of what we've been doing has been trial-and-error. I've tried doing research to help improve our chances of success but much of what I read contradicts other sources and some of this stuff has too much scientific jargon for my present level of understanding. So, basically we've decided to collect our compost-friendly food waste and dump it all into a pile with some leaves and ash and wait to see what happens. There are worse places to start.

The traditional compost seemed to be a bit slimy at times. I suspect this was due to too much food matter (green) and not enough carbon (brown) matter. I could have kept the compost too wet, as well. Either way, when I pulled the plastic housing off the pile and spread it out it looked as though everything turned out pretty well. Pulling the pile apart with a shovel, I found that nature had produced a heap of dark black soil from all that stuff I had thrown in there over the past eight months. We immediately used it to plant a few pots of herbs and vegetables and the rest went into a large storage bin to be used in the future.

The vermicompost was a little more labor-intensive. The bin had to be dumped out onto a large tarp in the sun. There was a pile of sticky black soil (aka, worm poo). The worms, exposed to the sun, immediately made their way down into the pile. We scooped up the top later and placed it into another bin. This exposed the worms again so they dug even deeper. Again we scooped off the top layer. On and on this process continued until we had separated the soil from the worms.

Here are the worms doing their job - eating our trash and making it into soil.

Everything is dumped out into the sun. The worms hate this part.

The soil is really wet and sticky. It was hard to get any evaporation during the winter months.

Sorting it all out. We found many "balls" of worms in there.

This is the final result - super rich soil.

Shredding newspaper to start all over again. The worms will eat this paper in addition to the food scraps.

We used our compost to plant basil, cilantro, tomatoes, and a few other things.

We also used it to plant some Carolina Jessamine around our screened porch. This is watered with the rain barrel.

The rest of the vermicompost is being brewed into "worm tea."

Here you see the bag of vermicompost sitting in the rainwater. An aquarium pump and air stones work to circulate the water. The resulting tea will help keep our plants really strong and healthy.

I'd love to go through this whole process next year with my class at school. It'd be fun to compost our food, sort the soil, brew it, and then conduct some experiments to see what benefits, if any, the worm tea offers. Taller plants? Greener plants? Stronger root systems? Who knows. If nothing else I can guarantee such a project would save many pounds of food from being hauled away by the gas guzzling trash truck.

The Bird

When Tricia, the kids, and I first came to South Carolina we moved into a new-construction home in the suburbs of Northeast Columbia. While our community had thousands of families, the street we built on was nowhere near full capacity. In fact, there were no other houses within five or six lots in any direction. It was nice being surrounded by all those trees. We were nestled back in the woods. That is until the lots started selling and the bulldozers began to knock down trees by the hundreds.

It was sad to see. In just a few hours a crew of three or four guys could reduce a quarter acre of trees to a sandy lot littered with upturned roots and spent Gatorade bottles. You always knew when this was set to happen because someone would come out and tag the property for clearing. I know trees do not have feelings but it was still a bit heartbreaking to sit on the porch and look at all those trees knowing what was soon to come.

A few times I drug a shovel and a collection of five-gallon buckets over and tried to save the smallest of those trees. I'd dig and dig and dig. I quickly found out that the tap root of a pine tree grows straight down into the ground and is just about as long as the tree is tall. Still, I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and worked until I had a tree in each bucket to bring back home.

I tried to transplant the first batch of trees into our backyard. They died. I tried another batch. They died, too. I took the next batch to school and set them in the courtyard just outside my classroom door. My class and I made it our duty to save these trees.

Hey, you're like the Lorax. You speak for the trees! my teammate said. Then she laughed at the sight of those three sad trees - all brown and looking as though they might make great kindling.  

Except that instead of saving the trees you seem to kill them! she added.

She was right. All I accomplished was prolonging the agony. At least the bulldozer was swift.

These failed attempts reminded me of the time when I was seven or eight and found a small blue robin egg on the ground. I brought it into my bedroom and tried to keep it warm under my pillow until I could create a box to keep it in. I filled the box with an assortment of t-shirts and grass. I carefully placed the egg in the box and then set the box under a small desk lamp, turned it on, and waited.

Nothing.

I waited for a week or two but there was never so much as a small wiggle. When I had given up hope that my baby bird would emerge I cracked open the egg to see what was inside. It just a bunch of gloop (if that's even a word). No legs, no wings, no beak. I had failed.

This all came back to me yesterday as I nearly killed a couple of baby birds whose mother had made a nest atop one of the pillars on our front porch. A neighbor mentioned to my mom that sometimes a snake will come out of the woods, climb up the pillar, and eat the birds. Thinking I'd move the nest before the bird had a chance to lay eggs in it, I went out with a broom serve my eviction notice.

I began by banging the broom against the pillar to see if a bird would fly out. It did not. I did it a few more times waiting to hear any small chirps of fear. There were none. So I carefully scooped the nest down onto the flat side of the broom bristles and set it in the yard. And that's when I heard it.

A small chirp.

I went and grabbed a pair of gardening gloves and tried to sort through the collection of grass and twigs - hoping to find nothing. Of course, though, I did. A tiny bird - with a coat of brown and black fuzz on its back - jumped from the crumpled nest and hid beneath a small clump of grass. I jumped back and called out a few choice words. I had really hoped I wasn't going to find anything in that nest.

About this time the mother came back and, not aware of what had happened, perched atop the pillar with a worm hanging out of her mouth. She had come back to feed her baby and found her entire home and family missing. I felt terrible. Uncomfortable by our presence she flew up to the roof of the house to try to make sense of what was happening.

With the help of my mom and the two boys I scooped the nest into a small plastic cereal bowl (to keep it together) and then went about trying to catch the baby bird in a dustpan. I wasn't sure if it was true that if you touch a baby bird with your hands its mother will abandon it but I wasn't willing to risk it. After many attempts (in which it jumped out of the dustpan) I finally got the baby bird into its nest. However, just as I placed it back on top of the pillar the bird jumped out of the nest and took a nosedive in the small crack between the house and the pillar. I used a small stick to slide it out and then put it back into its nest. At that point we all ran inside not wanting to know what would happen next. There was nothing else we could do.

When I woke up this morning, after listening to the many storms roll in and out through the night, I looked out the front window to see if the nest was still up there. It was. Within a few moments the mother bird came swooping in with a worm in her mouth and hopped up into the nest.

It worked.

The mother bird is on the left warning me to not to do this again!

Easy Come, Easy Go

A few weeks back my buddy Tim and I entered a March Madness basketball pool. This in itself isn't all that newsworthy because we enter a basketball pool every year. When I was younger and more willing to fill my head and time with meaningless scores and stats I felt the $5 or $20 entry fee was but a small investment toward greater reward. Of course, this was never the case.

Now that I'm older, busier, and likely won't watch a single college basketball game all year it would serve to reason my chances of winning are even slimmer than before. When I look at all those schools in the brackets I tend to remember them for how good they were eight or nine years ago and pick accordingly. Or else I just keep picking the teams who are seeded highest so I can hope to finish in a 50-way tie with all the other mindless knuckleheads filling out a bracket.

This year I chose a handful of upsets here and there but kept most of the #1 seeds in line to play for the championship. I wasn't sure who the best of the best was supposed to be but took a random guess - the Kentucky Wildcats. It turns out they were something like 33-2 this year and the hands-down favorite to win it all.  A lucky guess except that about 60% of America chose them to win which made my chances of winning the pool even worse. On my second bracket I tabbed Ohio State who, it turns out, had been playing really badly over the past few weeks and very few people were picking. Again, the chances were slim.

But, alas, the stars have aligned. For all the ignorance I brought to the two brackets I filled out I am currently in 8th and 16th place. Out of 432. Kentucky is already in the final and Ohio State is playing Kansas in the other semi-final. If Kansas wins tonight and then falls to the Wildcats on Monday I'll finish 3rd. If Ohio State wins tonight and then goes on to beat the Wildcats on Monday I'll come in 5th. Gambling is illegal so let's just say 3rd place is good enough to win 1,000 pats on the back from the 429 people who finished behind me while 5th place is worth 600 congratulatory high-fives. Of course, if neither of those scenarios play out I'll have accomplished nothing more than being strung along for an extra week or two.

Of course, I'd gladly trade this for one of those three winning lottery tickets that will share more than $600 million dollars. We never buy lottery tickets so our chances of splitting that jackpot weren't all that spectacular except that Tim buys tickets each week and has long promised to give us 10% should he ever win. During that time he and I have come up with some great ideas as to what we'd do with that much money. Some, like building a "major league" whiffle ball park for ourselves to play in, were realistic while others, like buying out Gary Sheffield's Yankee contract and making him go back and play for the small-market Milwaukee Brewers,  were a little more far-fetched.

For this week's lotto jackpot of more than a half-billion dollars Tim bought not one, but five tickets. The extra four bucks increased his chances of winning from about 170,000,000 to 1 to a far more likely 34,000,000 to 1. Turns out it didn't help much. He was a loser for the 518th time in a row. So I guess the whiffle ball park will have to wait at least another week. Until then...

Go KENTUCKY!

Choices

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.
                                                                --Henry David Thoreau

Life presents us an endless string of choices. While some are really big, most are so mundane we don't even recognize them as a choice at all - say, whether you brush or floss first.

Of course, there are an infinite number of choices we fail to recognize not because they are mundane but because we've been programmed - make that, conditioned - to ignore them. Just this morning I could have woken up and started singing "Oh What a Wonderful Morning" at the top of my lungs while mercilessly tickling Tricia awake. However, I subconsciously know there's a very good chance I'd receive a swift knee to the groin so my mind skips over this choice without my conscious self even realizing it. More realistically I could have ridden my bike to the grocery store this morning, packed the groceries into the bike trailer, and pedaled back home all in the name of fresh air, exercise, and conservation. But this falls outside of my normal routine so I never considered doing so.

Life's big choices weigh on us more heavily. Where to go to school. What to study. Who to marry. Where to live. What church to go to. How to spend, or maybe even save, our money. How we make each of these choices says a lot about us. In many ways these choices define us - if not for ourselves, at least for others.

I chose to go to Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville because it was what we could afford. I chose to study education because journalism was not what I thought it would be and I remembered how much I enjoyed kids. I chose to marry Tricia because she was kind, smart, fun, and pretty (At the time I started with pretty and let the other reasons reveal themselves along the way). I chose not to go to church because I realized that any god who would let my dad suffer so much in one lifetime deserved neither my love nor my  faith. We choose to spend our money, when possible, on experiences rather than things.

Some choices are easier to make than others. There's a quote I like that goes "If you limit your choices to only what seems possible or reasonable you disconnect yourself from what you truly want and all that is left is compromise." Compromise is easy. And safe.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I watched the kids jump from our new dock into the lake. The water was so cold it would have been easier to dangle their feet in and splash around a bit. That's what the grown-ups did. But while we chose to wait until summer when the water is less likely to emit an initial scream of discomfort, the kids chose to jump right in because it was exactly what they wanted to be doing at that very moment of time. No amount of cool breezes or chill bumps were about to keep them from their fun.

Seeing them splashing and laughing out in the water made me think, too, about how happy we've all been since we moved here into the country. Swinging from tire swings, building fires, and looking out into nights so black you wonder if there's anything out there at all. Moving here, that was a choice too. A choice that at the time was not easy. It was definitely not safe. But it was right.

I ran back to the house to grab my camera so I could capture some of the things that remind me how much I love living and playing in the woods. In the meantime we'll think on other big choices that seem, at least right now, to be impossible.

What I Hate: V - X

It's been quite a long while since I have visited this list. Some -namely my buddy and co-blogger Tim - would suggest this layoff is due to the fact I have finally reached the bane of all ABC books and lists - the letter X. This is a finicky letter that most dictionaries can knock out in less than three pages. A letter any novice Scrabble player hates to pull from the bag when all the A's and O's on the board are tied-up.

 It's been my experience, outside of the oft-used xylophone and x-ray, that most writers cheat on this letter. Our son Ty has an ABC book of Alaska and for the letter X it reads "X-tra Large State!" This author obviously has no integrity. There is no such word as X-tra. I would think that if you choose to take on such a task you should, at the very least, be diligent and do your research; or else select a more writer-friendly format.

Our school had a visiting author this past week. He writes ABC books for children (although he claims to really write for teachers). Over the past two decades he has written more than a dozen of these alphabet books. There's the Jet ABC Book, the Plane ABC Book, the Extinct ABC Book, the Vegetable ABC Book, and so on. During his visit the teachers had an opportunity to have lunch with him and ask all sorts of questions and learn more about what it's like to be a writer. He explained, with regard to writing ABC books, the first twenty letters are a piece of cake but the final six are excruciating. U, V, W, X, Y, and Z. No, these letters are not for the meek. Especially that damn X.

Here's the latest installment...

V- VENTURE CAPITAL. This one may not be fair given that I have no earthly idea what venture capitalism actually is. I looked it up only to find that the definition made no sense to me what-so-ever. If you have sixty seconds you don't mind wasting you too can give it a try:

Venture capital (VC) is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which and usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as biotechnology, IT, software, etc. The typical venture capital investment occurs after the seed funding round as growth funding round (also referred to as Series A round) in the interest of generating a return through an eventual realization event, such as an IPO or trade sale of the company. Venture capital is a subset of private equity. Therefore, all venture capital is private equity, but not all private equity is venture capital.

Others: vagueness, veils, valedictorian speeches, Vaseline, vampire books, vandalism, vans, varmint (the word), velvet, vengefulness, ventriloquists, and vermouth (it just sounds snotty)

W - WRESTLING (at least the "professional" sort). I enjoy stopping on wrestling programs just to see how long it takes Tricia to get mad at me. When I was a kid I really liked wrestling - especially Hulk Hogan. As he headed to ring they would play his theme song "I Am a Real American." Do you want to know what's more embarrassing than the fact that I know this? The fact that Newt Gingrich used this very song last week at one of his events. Yikes!

Others: waiting rooms, wallpaper, warts, whiskey, and wedding receptions

X - XANADU. A really, really, really, really bad movie. The equally lame tagline was The story of a girl who makes dreams come true. This movie was so bad the only bright spot movie critic Roger Ebert could find to highlight was that "It's not as bad as 'Can't Stop the Music'."

Others:  xenophobia, Xena Warrior Princess, and X-tra large food portions