food Archives • Page 16 of 16 • False(B)logic

Compost Woes: Fine-tuning My Compost Pile: The Search for Black Gold

We’ve had our composter now for a year-and-half or two years I think. It is definitely its second winter. Unlike last winter though things aren’t going as well. Instead of things breaking down and turning into a nice mulch I can spread into the garden. They’re turning into a stinky sewage. I’d like to blame this on the cold and rain but I don’t think they are completely at fault.

Our household has recently (the past six months) started composting everything possible. This means a lot of “green” is going into the composter. According to what I’ve been able to find out about composting all this “green” needs to be balanced out with “brown,” if you want the ideal environment for composting to occur. I’ve been neglecting the brown and throwing in a lot of “green” recently and things have gone sour.

That is okay though because I’m getting a little help from the United States Government:

The Post Office had stacks and stacks of these packets sitting there waiting for John Q. Citizen to pick them up if they needed some tax assistance. I grabbed 20 or so figuring that’d help. I cut off the glue binding to the packets and shredded them:

A stack of about half of the paper I shredded

After the paper was shredded into the bin it went:

In two weeks this better look like compost...

Composting hasn’t turned out to be the simple formula I thought it was: scraps in, soil out. It takes a lot more tweaking and guesswork. I’m still getting the hang of it. If adding paper doesn’t do the trick I might have to get some straw or move the composter so that it gets more sun.

I never thought I’d be experimenting with the “art” of composting.

P.S. Love that title up there don’t ya?

Food. Delicious Food.

Between my self and Mrs. Di over 400 pictures were taken of our New York City vacation. The vast majority of those are of museum exhibits. Really awesome museum exhibits but the reality is that they’re not the best taken pictures, and to anyone besides us they’re just not that interesting. That doesn’t bother me, they perfect for what they are a chronicle of our vacation. I’m not going to plaster pictures of every little thing at the Metropolitan Museum that I thought was great here, because chances are you’re not interested as interested in Roman Egypt as I am (but you should be!) What you will find is something that everyone is interested in: food

Despite all the food I ate in NYC I didn’t take as many pictures of it as I should have. You’re not going to see the delicious spicy tofu soup I had in K Town, nor the incredible spread that accompanied it. I don’t have any pictures of the delicious doughnuts we ate at Doughnut Plant; creme brulee, apple cinnamon, vanilla bean, etc. Also missing is all the wonderful food bought and eaten of the streets.

“So what do you have to show us already?”

The thing that I was most envious of during my trip was the sheer variety of ethnic cuisines to be found in the city! I’m sure that you could eat at a different restaurant featuring a different food style every day of the week for the entire year. I feel lucky living where I do, in a college town with a racially diverse population that enjoys ethnic cuisine that’s close to two major metropolitan areas but it doesn’t hold a candle to New York City…

PS – I forgot to mention the bars… There are a lot of them. They stay open ’til four in the morning. I only went to this one: McSorley’s. They have good ale.