Giant Holiday Gift Wrap
Yesterday I made an enormous bag out of a black tarp. This is the biggest package I've ever made. Not the prettiest wrapping job, but it serves a good purpose.
My compost pile has been growing quickly ever since the fall leaves have dropped. In the back of the photo, there is a basket I made to hold some of the extra leaves. They are decomposing very quickly in the heavy rains we have had.
This bag of compost was so big, I couldn't even drag it. The only way it would budge was by yanking on the cord and kicking up the base.
Usually I have to act quickly to rake up as many leaves as I can in the early morning after they fall, because my parents will get rid of it as soon as they can while I am at work. They look at leaves and compost an eyesore, whereas I see black gold.
My father hauled about a half a dozen bags of leaves and drove somewhere downtown to have them take it. I don't understand why they do it this, considering how easily I learned how to recycle it into something better for free, but that's how he's been doing it for longer than I've been alive. Something tells me I still might be on the losing side of this battle in my aging family.
Here's what the compost looked like when I moved it onto the tarp.
This is a 9x9' black plastic tarp. I used a pitchfork to stack up the compost. Being a city slicker, I had fun using a weird tool that resembles a giant metal fork.
There's a lot of worms and rainwater mixed into there. Not sure it will heat up, but the tarp should help hold in some moisture, and keep the rainwater from washing out my compost. I heard that using a tarp can help preserve much of the nutrients so it doesn't get washed out by the rain. We'll see if that's true for me. The tarp should also keep critters from digging through my pile and spreading it out so much.
I'm probably not going to turn the pile over for many months as it will get very cold and wet outside. You never know, though. Sometimes we get a warm, sunny day in January. If the mood strikes, maybe I'll come out and rake it up a bit.
Have you done your holiday wrapping yet? Probably not like mine I'm hoping.
Bonus photos:
Still growing carrots. These are one of the few vegetables still growing in my yard. Most of them are growing slower and smaller than I expected. I think being near the fallen leaves and roots of the Sumac tree was a bad idea on my part. It is such nice sunny area, and I really want to turn this into a productive gardening space. I'm going to try hoeing the soil even deeper next spring, and amend it with gobs and gobs of compost and sand to break up the deep clay.
Not giving up yet. I'll wait until the foliage starts to turn yellow before I harvest the carrots, and I'll probably leave a few of the runts buried to see what happens in the spring. Will they flower and spread seeds? Will they rot and decompose? Will they continue to grow into bigger carrots? Wait and see.
Beside the carrots...
The strawberries are propagating themselves nicely, and already have a nice warm blanket of dead leaves forming around their crowns. I originally had about six plants. One of them is growing through the open pockets of the retraining wall. Should make a nice summer treat to share for the children who walk to school on the sidewalk. The two types I grow are called Hood and Ft. Laramie. These strawberry plants do not seem to be negatively affected by the Sumac tree at all.