Hi! Today’s subject is compost, as well as a brief garden update.

This is where compost starts its journey:

 

 In the compost bowl! It is a large bowl that we put all of our PAREVE kitchen scraps into- banana peels, apple cores, rotten produce, bread, eggshells, etc. But note the underline: If you put in meat or milk scraps, it will attract animals once it journeys outside. You can put in almost anything else, though.

This is the compost bin- or rather, bins. There are two separate compartments. It has several small air holes on the sides, and it turns to aerate the compost further.

A picture of it turned on its side:

A picture of it open:

 

There are kitchen scraps in there. They are turning into compost already! Also, you can see some grass clippings and dead leaves.

And the compost pile is pretty much the same thing. It is more experimental- we don’t know what will happen. It is pretty much a pile of grass clippings. We turn it over with a pitchfork every once in a while.

Now, I bet some of you are wondering why I put “Coffee Grounds” in the title. And some of you have figured it out by now. Anyway, a great compost tip is to put coffee grounds in your compost pile! Where do you get these? Go to Starbucks. Ask. They’ll be happy to give you some of their used coffee grounds- for free! The only downside is the smell- it’ll make your car smell like coffee for about a week afterwards. But once you have them home,  just dump them into your compost pile/bin (not the bowl!), mix it around a little, and tend it normally. It helps. And it’s good for the environment: Starbucks would have thrown those grounds away otherwise.

A quick garden update, because the plants have gotten much bigger since two weeks ago:

These are the plants still growing inside. Now, to the far left: peas! They’re taller than everything else, though they are the youngest. (Refer back to my first post for a map.)

And the ones outside:

This is kale on the left and lettuce on the right.

Here, lettuce on the left and swiss chard on the right. The swiss chard is not doing so well- we are not sure why, but everything else seems to be doing fine.

 

The raised beds have already been installed, but I wrote this post before they were, so I will post about them next week so I don’t lengthen this post any more than I have to! So:

Next week: Raised Beds!