*you bring back used tea bags from business meetings, wrapped in a napkin in your pocket.

*your wife nearly divorces you because your father sent back his old broccoli plants in her minivan, filling the vehicle with their pungent, fecal aroma.

*you carry a tarp in your trunk, just in case someone has some good compostables you can snag.

*you post this thread on the Soil, Compost & Mulch forum just to see what other crazy hijinks your fellow compost wackos are up to!

Thanks for starting this up again, doowad.

Last night, I cleaned out my temporary garden so I could plant grass back (since my main beds are going to rest under hairy vetch for the winter) and I would pick up every little scrap of dried leaf and dirt and walk it back to the compost pile. Like a book my daughter loved when she was 2, "boom boom, ain't it great to be crazy!"

I thought of another one last night while watching tv: You might be a compost wacko if the only thing you can think of while watching a reality show where they clean out a restaurant kitchen pantry of rotten vegetables is what fantastic compost that stuff would make...

Sugarmaple - that's funny, but I imagine that policy is based in an experience they actually had. People will try anything for a buck.

Trust me on this, there is no doubt a lot of you are whackos. Wear that badge proudly.

Lloyd

....and when they come over for a ballgame on the deck and see my bins they go bonkers .....( could be the beer! )

anywho......I will wear the badge proudly.....it makes for a better me ......JB

You spend three years in school, graduate, fly out of state to attend a certification hearing in which you are approved by unanimous vote of over 100 people and you call your mother (who is waiting by the phone on pins and needles) to tell her the good news and the first words out of your mouth are "How are my worms?! Have you been feeding them like I showed you?!"

You cannot enter a restaurant or cafe without wondering if you could get them to hand over all their fruit and vegetable scraps.

You actually feel gleeful when you accidentally spill an entire one-pound bag of frozen peas all over the kitchen floor, because you know your worms will love them.

You wonder out loud whether you could feed the new parakeet worms from your worm bin, and feed the worms the poop and dropped bird food and liners from the bottom of the bird cage, and how you wish you could because that would be a perfect symbiotic relationship...and your entire family looks at you like you just sprouted a second head.

There is something about having a prissy little 150 year old book on the coffee table that's all about composting manure that I find funny.

How could they?!! All that protein nitrogen!

Also, you start to get real secretive about your cardboard shredding habits, because you know your mom would flip if she ever knew how much corrugated cardboard you were running through her little home paper shredder. Honestly, do you think that an entire trunk-load twice weekly would void the warranty?

Also, when you call your fiance and tell him that reading posts about compost at work turned your horible day around, only to be met by awkward silence. I can't wait to see his reaction when he will never again be able to just "throw something away".

Kim

I'm guessing you are not male.

;-)

Lloyd

P.S. If you are, you're a braver man than I.

I asked my mother to please wait a minute so I could first go ask the officers if they had de-wormed their horses recently and she literally grabbed me by the arm and dragged me away so I wouldn't embarrass her. I was like, "Help, help, I'm being oppressed!"

Composting wackos, unite!

Also, Groomie2 and Sun-n-Clay: Your moms and my mom gotta get together - I'm sure they would have a lot to talk about. :-D They could form a support group:

Mothers Understanding Lunatic Composting Heirs (MULCH)

How much C did you use?

Just curious.

;-)

Lloyd

1) She totally hogs the shredder and won't let me help shred the cardboard anymore.

2) She demanded her own worm bin with her OWN worms.

3) She totally hogs the shovel when we go to collect horse manure and won't let me help at all.

4) When shoveling horse manure, she keeps saying, "I just want to fill ONE MORE bucket, Mom!" but really, she can't stop until all the buckets are gone.

4) She told me that when she grows up, she wants to be a "horse poop shoveler."

I think we're going to need three separate support groups: one for my mom:

Mothers Understanding Lunatic Composting Heirs (MULCH)

One for me:

Letting Our Adolescents Monopolize Yardwaste (LOAMY)

One for my kid:

Hogging Unfairly Mother's "Unhealthy" Sideline (HUMUS)

And yes, I used to bring home boxes of spoiled produce from the back of the grocey store where I worked at the time. Now I just salivate this time of year so I can bring home bags of my neighbors leaves.

Curt

If you carry two old Bamboo screens home on the bus, and spend hours with a wire cutter, freeing the Bamboo from the miles of copper wire, in order to shred them. Someone said (jokingly I hope) that I was "seriously deranged."
Well - I try to like up to my claim that 'I can compost anything'.

You Chase a snake across the lawn with said mower cuz he'd make a nice addition to the pile.

I leave that shopping centre 3-4 times a week visably salivating as my mind reels at the potential of my "fantastic haul"...

...then my phone rings, a friend noticed some horse droppings on the road only a few miles away...

I have a problem.

M

~you remember the date of the last day you buried kitchen scraps in your garden in the fall (trench composting) and the location so you can check in the spring to see how decomposed it is. Just part of composting stats, ya know! ;D

Building my annual pile now, loving the layering of OPL, UCG, sheep manure and the uncomposted top of last year's pile, garden leavings, etc. I can see it from the house - it lights up the winter. Yes, I might be one too.

Why LoboGothic? Here we are, sheep manure, last year's compost pile in background.

Might make a nice holiday card.

Nice spread, by the way.

On the way home I decided I should get a bumper sticker, "This vehicle stops for bags of leaves!" Sometimes actually, it stops on a dime!

Frances

I imagine out among the forum contributors and readers, there are some fans of Ted Talks, a series of mini-lectures on diverse subjects.

And so when we have an Onion sendup of a Ted Talk that concerns compost, I just had to pass this along....

;-)

Lloyd

You might be a compost whacko if you drive a car that runs on compost.

Lol too bad that is in fact not the case. Many driving far just to get some compost or material to compost only to do more harm to the enviroment then someone that does not even compost and just uses fertilizer!

So yes, you may be a 'compost wacko' if you waste more time and money making the compost then it is even worth. :)

Lol ;)

Lloyd

Where was it somebody tried blowing up dead rotting beached whales with dynamite? Brain fog here.....