You might be..... if you get excited when the circus comes to town, not because of the clowns and acrobats, but because of what the elephants leave behind!!

if you loose sleep while your soil test is being done wondering what your % organic matter will come back as... lol mine is 11.4 %

If on a cold december day you are stairing out your window at the neighbors trees wondering about the micro nutrents that are going to be in your compost from the leaves you piled there from those trees.

Curt

On a slow day, you build a horizontal barrel composter out of cardboard, staples, a paper clip, and an index card. You even draw the little door on the barrel and make sure it actually spins. You do this so you have a model to reference when building your actual composter. Then you consider building a tiny scale model but out of real wood and some kind of plastic container as the barrel.

If the first thing you do when it is light enough outside on these cold Vermont winter day mornings is to check the compost bin for its temperature. And, you genuinely rejoice when you find the temperature in there is holding its own.

if you post to this thread.... :p

if you get a scolding look from you wife for asking the grocery produce guy what they do with all the scraps and stuff that goes bad....

Ha, I'm proud to have started this thread, great to hear all these stories...

If you scrounge around for old wickerwork baskets, spend time and effort pulling them apart with pliers, then puting them through the shredder.

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'.

Sorry - typo error - was supposed to read;
"I try to live up to my claim......"

When your lawn mower blade has an S curve in it from using it to chip branches because your pile needs some C.

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

Everyone you know are cleaning out the summer garden & maping out the fall garden.
You are mapping out the best streets for fall collection OPL & shortest way from them to your new fall compost pile.

What a great feeling to know you can "compost anything", but not peach pits. They never compost.

You need pigs to do the peach pits. I remember my dad canning a ton of peaches when I was younger and we feed them the skins & pits. The crunched them up like corn nuts.

Right about now you are collecting fallen apples from trees for your compost.

There is a small shopping centre which hosts a pet shop (for lovely rabbit bedding), a coffee shop (with unguarded UCG bins out the back), and a home improvement store (who give away out of season veggie plants).

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

wow, that makes me salivate, rabbit bedding & coffee grounds... awesome

You butcher a deer and take the carcass home to push your composting skills and experiments to a new level, hoping you've put enough carbon around it to not cause your little 1/4 acre suburban lot to make the whole block smell like a rendering plant...

~every time you turn the pile you watch for the avocado pits and skins that take a very long time to break down. I think they do eventually break down as I rarely see them by the time I spread the compost on my garden.

~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

Update on the deer carcass. I took a temperature reading yesterday and he was cooking at 142 degrees. I'll admit my pallet system may be on the small side for a carcass that size as you can faintly smell it when you get about 5 feet from the pile... My estimate is that in a week or two at those temps, the smell should become less of an issue as my microherd eats it up.

Loved reading these posts for the third time. Priceless. My favourite is the one about the guy with the $300 bar bill making 16 or 17 trips with his truck to deliver the manure. Good start indeed!

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.

Classic pose, a couple in front of their rotting pile of garbage and manure :-)

Might make a nice holiday card.

Nice spread, by the way.

LOVE it!

Very Nice LoBo!
My son works in a kitchen & bought me a grocery bag full of banana peeling without me asking.
He also cut grass on the weekends & Bring me the clippings & leaves. Got 2 bags today, got to give that boy gas money if he keep adding to the compost pile like that.

Yes, the tarp goes into our van in the fall. This morning I went into town to do a couple of errands and stopped twice to pick up bags of leaves beside the street. Bonus - two of the bags were sawdust and the guy who lives in the house came over and helped me.

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

Sawdust & leaves sure work well with the manure & UCG.
I have composted coffee grounds & coffee whole beans by the truck load with no problem.
But some people say you must mix them well with other organic matter.

My old man asked me to help him clean off his garden. He is renting an established vegetable garden whose owner has gotten too old to care for it (she is about 15 years his senior). I am always glad to do this so I can stuff my old car full of all the scraps, plus tons of good oak leaves and this year even some manure that the old lady's son had dumped on the garden for him. I left him a nice little mini-lasa�a with a layer of leaves and manure on top of his good topsoil. He tills, but I told him to leave that on till spring so it can break down and before tilling in. Anyway, I told my daughter she had better hope her mom came to the party we went to today so she (daughter) didn't have to ride home him in my car full of firewood, leaves, compost, garden scraps and literally poop.

I imagine out among the forum contributors and readers, there are some fans of The Onion, a satirical website.

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....

Here is a link that might be useful: utube link

Well there is three minutes and thirty two seconds of my life I won't get back.

;-)

Lloyd

Good one!

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

We're stuck in a bit of dry spell here, only an inch and a half of rain since before Halloween. So my neighbors give me quite the strange look when they see me with the hose watering my compost pile.

"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 ;)

This post was edited by TheMasterGardener1 on Mon, Dec 3, 12 at 11:43

@TheMasterGardener1, I was thinking the same thing the other day when I was unloading leaves from my truck as my fertilizer-using neighbors were inside watching football on TV.

Sad story but did anyone else have thoughts??

Lloyd

Here is a link that might be useful: Whale carcass on Malibu shore

Well, lets see. Decomposing whale is a green, 80 tons of it, so we'd need at least 80 tons of browns - probably want half again, what with trying to insure that the odors aren't so bad as to trouble Malibu denizens. So I figure the easiest thing would be shredded newspaper. Cover whale with that, then with sand to make sure the newspaper wouldn't blow away.

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

My daughter, who is a senior in high school, takes a couple empty plastic coffee containers to school and gives them to two of her teachers who make coffee. They put the coffee grounds and filters in and she picks it up when it's full for me to put in my compost pile. She's done this since ninth grade. When she starts school each fall, I give her veggies from my garden to give to the teachers who provided the coffee grounds. It's great that the teachers do this and of my daughter for doing it. I'm going to miss this when she starts college next year.

sugarmaple, I'm sure you and your daughter can figure something out for college! Don't give up!

If you sweep up all the hair after your haircut at the hairdresser's and ask for a bag to take it home for your compost.

If you carry 5-gallon buckets of UCG into the house so they will thaw out after picking them up at Coffee Culture because they've started leaving them outside for you. Then when they've thawed enough to dump out, you carry them 100 yards to the pile.

I love compost wacko threads!

about that shredded cardboard:
it does dull shredder blades, but you can get around that.

Just keep a big tub of water somewhere near your compost pile & lay the cardboard in the water until it's well-saturated.

It'll come apart in your hands.

& then you just put it in a bucket & drop it onto the compost pile.

Sugarmaple-better yet, those teachers start a compost bin and garden at the school! Let those kids get an Idea of where those veges come from!
I just retired after 38 years in Spec Ed and have already started one school garden.From compost to garden to table! Nancy

you go to a party and ask for the empty pizza boxes because you want to shred them and add them to your compost pile

your a college student who finds it necessary to save all food scraps in a kitty litter container so when you go home you can compost them.

...if you read every line of a thread in which people rhaposidize about their compost...in haiku.

Here is a link that might be useful: compost haiku

NONOnononono- NOT the Haiku! LOL

no haiku???

well, ok.

How about...*Limericks*!

Here is a link that might be useful: Compost Limericks

I'm more a mulch wacko, what with my droughty sterile sand soil. Luckily the large ancient park-like semi-wooded cemetery near here bags many of its leaves in big heavy plastic bags and puts them by the road for the collectors. The collectors never get them if I spot them first and I go by for other reasons daily. I probably got well over 50 large bags last years, and in a hour or so will be over 50 this year. (I try to avoid mulling the nutrient-migration implications of wide-ranging tree roots and decayed wood coffins. Just kidding.)

'try to avoid mulling the nutrient-migration implications of wide-ranging tree roots and decayed wood coffins.'

which reminds me:

You might be a compost wacko if you leave instructions to have your mortal remains composted!

Time to move this one up! LOVE this thread!

You might be a compost whacko if you spend a cold, rainy evening moving half of last year's manure pile to make room for another fresh load. When they're ready to deliver, you hop to it!

You might be a compost whacko if you spend $90 on a single book to learn more about the technical aspects of composting.

Maybe Lloyd will understand.

Here is a link that might be useful: Book about composting

I just want to see the rest of the cute gal on the right of the compost page!

The one that is labeled "Are You a Compost Whacko?" ;)

You might be a compost wacko if you eagerly accept the offer of the contents of someone else's half-done compost bin.

Saturday a friend, who's moving in a month, offered me the contents of her compost bin. So we drove over, loaded it all on to the back of a trailer, and transplanted it into next year's asparagus bed.

We did get the soil from 2 4x4 raised beds too. Bonus!