Heh heh heh. I live with punny children. It rubs off.

I have a compost bin, now. I feed it newspaper and leaves and huge amounts of vegetable trimmings and coffee, and it sits and munches like a large black troll, attracting fruit flies and burping once in awhile.

Oh, all the many pages I’ve read about compost – because decomposition is difficult, yeah? – say “cover with browns and you won’t get fruit flies”, but since when is a fruit fly put off by a skiff of newspaper? They’re SMALL. And it’s not like you want an airtight, fruit fly proof seal – the troll, he needs to breathe.

I like my compost pile, flies and all. It needs another month of growth before it’ll be big enough to really heat up, but I believe in it.

As I was carrying my kitchen waste out one night, I considered this: all attempts to eat local notwithstanding, I was carrying an international bucket. Lemon and lime peels, tea bags, coffee grounds, browned fruit, avacado peel – all these nutrients pulled out of other soils, floated or flown, to find their way to my composting troll’s belly. 

Eventually, these nutrients will be spread around my strawberries, used to top dress my lawn. My clover and grass will green up on international nitrogen.