Composting

This makes me so happy. At first I thought this would be a light, trivial post, but more I read the more I think its important: Composting. The food we're growing is becoming less and less nutritious, and in addition, more poisonous. Studies of hair strands of prisoners are finding more arsenic, lead, and other heavy metals accumulating in their bodies.

I'm so glad less of our stuff is going to the landfill, and look at it, its so beautiful: orange peelings, lettuce cores, rotten strawberries, egg shells, banana peelings: all full of wonderful organic nutrients to replenish the soil. It doesn't even smell out of doors, and the bottom is pretty decomposed already.

My husband said once, "its all stuff that will decompose in the landfill anyway," BUT that's if it has oxygen. Is the garbage is piled in a heap in the landfill? The main thing is, once we run out of good soil, what are we going to do? Build a wheat field on top the landfill, in heaps of printers, fax machines, and old batteries? Hire minimum wage workers to go dig up good soil from our junked vegetable peelings in the landfill? If our world ever came to that... and that'd be impossible, to glean clean soil from all the contaminants.

So then what? More fertilizer factories (whose smokestacks also release lead, cadmium mercury, radium, arsenic, and other contaminants)?

Here's a great video message on taking things out of the landfill:
"The Atonement Can Clean, Reclaim, and Sanctify Our Lives"
Composting tips:
Do not add: Meat, Oil, Dairy, or Pet poo

Do add: brown matter (sticks, brown leaves, for carbon), green matter (grass clippings for nitrogen), water (overwatering will stink it up, a little water helps decomposition), red worms (we just used the ones from our garden), and of course, we add all our fruit and vegetable cores, rot, tops, and peelings, and pure grains or legumes, and egg shells.

Turn often for best results

Where to put it? Its hard if you live in a complex, and don't even have a garden. Google it and find out what to do!

Pullman city also does a yard waste pick-up, which is great. We have separate bins for grass clippings and yard waste which gets picked up every two weeks for recycling.