Junque Yard - Compost Happens & Loofah Uprising

I'm still typing one-handed, and can't take (decent) pictures, but I wish I could!

Yesterday daMan started cleaning up the yard for the winter. Containers that held plants or dirt have been emptied into the compost pile in the back behind the garage. Compost is one life's greatest inventions. It's the process of creating nutrient rich soil where none used to be. Cooking waste, everything except animal products like meat, bones, and dairy, get thrown into a garbage can that has holes drilled into it for ventilation, and so that worms can get in there. More on that in a minute. that stuff gets layered with grass clipping, shredded paper products, or in our cases, an over abundance of straw and wet down water. the act of decomposition starts and the pile heats up accelerating the whole, but whats really fascinating to those who grow, is that its worms that make the magic happen. they tunnel through the chunks and clumps breaking up the bigger pieces so they break down faster, eating as they go, and their leavings are the rich soil, so good for growing your veggies.

We are very lazy composters. We don't turn the piles or water them down as much as we could, making composting the process go much faster.But the beauty of it is, it doesn't matter. Compost happens. And now that you know that compost is glorified worm poop, that makes the phrases "Compost Happens" that much more funny. For gardeners, anyway.


Ok, so enough with the science already, it is only 7am on a Sunday...

The other cool thing about the fall clean up yesterday was that I was lamenting to daMan that my poor loofah plant never had a chance. I had planted it late, and it never even started flowering until late August, and I didn't water it enough. I had quite a few loofah wanna-be's hanging on the vines, but they probably wouldn't be able to come to fruition with the cold setting in. We've already had a few cold nights, and the leaves were starting to turn brown.  I wistfully sighed that it was too bad we couldn't bring it inside and see if those little loofah-lings would grow.

And in true daMan fashion, he made it happen. he cleaned out the corner of the patio the loofah was in, meaning he ripped out the corn stalks that grew up out of the seams in the concrete (we have no idea how that got there, but in typical me fashion, I refused to get rid of it so I could see what it would do), untangling a mess of loofah vine that had escaped the giant container I'd planted it in (it grows like a pumpkin or a zucchini in that it vines like crazy with tons of curly tendrils), putting it on a little wagon and carting it into the living room to the one window where it might get a scant bit of sunlight during the day. So there is a giant pot complete with trellis and 2 additional poles to catch the extra vines IN MY LIVING ROOM. It looks horrendous.

I love it.