For many years composting has occurred at our house. While chicken wire enclosures are strategically situated just beyond tree line around the property to collect leaves, the actual composting occurs in this plastic bin purchased at the town dump decades ago. It has a commercial name of “Earth Machine” but basically consists of this plastic garbage pail/bin with a cover and vents on the side. It is open bottomed. Technically you access the composted material from a door (see bottom left of the device). We have never used this door.
Traditionally, stuff gets put in at the top, you add water occasionally and the material gets stirred with a stick (maybe). Over time (like two years!), you pull off the plastic bin and you have a pile as shown in foreground. With advent of the retirement plague-made-in-china-but-really-a-hoax-but-preventable-with-dubious-anti-malarial-properties-discovered-forty-years-ago, we have the time to improve our production schedules. We are hoping for a third wave at the end of summer?
To get to the final product, this brown stuff has to be sifted through a strainer (quarter inch/half inch metal grid) before filling re-cycled Plastic kitty litter bins (as shown).
Two months since the start of my forced retirement into a world of take-out dining and no toilet paper. Who would of thunk it? Actually, many people have. I just finished reading an article in the Smithsonian magazine describing the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. We are following that history almost perfectly; denial at all levels; deliberate mis-counting; delayed reaction; imagine this, the world attempted to return to normal too soon and the second wave was bigger than the first. Oh, should I reveal that the vaccine came after the third wave? In our defense, the article came out too long ago for many of us to remember (the article appeared in the Nov-2017 issue).
The article uses research from John Barry’s “The Great Influenza, “ I believe.
The east end of the no-name pond in the back-woods about 4pm. We have been lucky only once to be here when a bird or birds happen to visit at the same time (hooded mergansers were here a week or so back). We usually approach from the west end and have seen ducks, mergansers, herons, bitterns, and kingfishers around the pond. Since it is about three hundred yards east-west, getting good photos is difficult. I sat here for over an hour with no luck.
