I'm subverting authority, thumbing my nose at the establishment, stickin' it to the man. Yeah.

That's right. I'm composting my kitchen scraps.

I've been battling with my neighbors (I'm trying to stop referring to them as "my stupid neighbors"....surely I'm getting too old for namecalling, right?) for the past few years about my compost piles. We're allowed to have them, so I'm not in any trouble there. The problem is that the first time the city inspector came out to look at my piles (after complaint #1 from said neighbors) I had fruit and veggie scraps in them, as well as some eggshells...you know...stuff you're supposed to compost. Anyway. He informed me that I'm allowed to have my piles, but there can't be any food matter in the piles because we don't want to attract rats. I had to take all of the food out of the pile, and the next time he came back, I was clean. Great.

Except that every potato peel, every eggshell, every apple core that I've thrown into the garbage has bothered me. What a waste! I don't even want to think about how many pounds of compost fodder I've thrown away since then. But at the end of this past winter, I decided that enough was enough. I grabbed a 25-gallon plastic storage container out of the basement (yes, stuff was being stored in it, but organization is frequently sacrificed in the name of gardening around my house...) and took my drill to it. I used a 1/4-inch spade bit and got drill-happy on the container. I drilled holes about 1 to 2 inches apart on all sides, top and bottom of the container. Then, I grabbed the coffee cans and tupperware that I'd been storing in the fridge, full of all of those lovely compostable kitchen scraps (oh, the stuff my husband puts up with...) and dumped it all in there. It was a little moist, so I shredded some newspaper and threw that in there as well. I shoveled a little finished compost over the scraps, put the lid on, and pretty much left it alone. Every time I added more kitchen scraps, I sprinkled a little finished compost or garden soil over the top. I've turned it by grabbing the container and giving it a shake whenever I remembered to. And now, I have a nice amount of finished compost. Ha!

In researching this type of composter, one thing that kept popping up was people complaining that the contents of the bin stayed too wet, and started to stink. I haven't had that problem at all, and I think there are two things that prevented that: lots and lots of holes in the bin and adding shredded newspaper when things started looking soggy. It works like a dream

So, there you go. That's how a gardener does civil disobedience. Power to the people!