It’s now official: No one listens to a word I say!
My adored friend Mary, who swears she loves Bob’s Little Acre and never misses a single one, told me on Saturday she had bought a composter. It was fairly pricey but she felt confident it would do the job because it came highly recommended by another friend of ours.
Who – get this – also swears she reads Bob’s Little Acre.
For crying out loud, folks! What do you think I’m doing, sitting here in the mud blathering on just to hear myself talk?
I know that not even the most devoted Bob reader will agree with every little opinion espoused by its narrator, not even BLA’s abiding message, which is that gardening is something you do, not something you buy.
But strictly from the perspective of thrift, shouldn’t people at least remember that I’ve written not one but two columns testifying to the utter uselessness of commercial composters?
The first column I wrote was about my early experiments with composting, when I had a secret lust for one of those barrel composters advertised in the back of gardening magazines. The second was years later, when someone had actually give me one, having become disgusted with it himself.
That composter never composted anything – or at least, nothing I put in it ever composted until I gritted my teeth and emptied it, maggoty and rancid, onto the ground, where hay on top and worms on bottom eventually did what they have been doing for millions of years.
We still have the damn thing, sitting out in “Jerry’s Little Acre,” the Tobacco-Road motif section of our yard given over to my husband’s detritus, about which I nag him bitterly and without effect and over which we may eventually divorce. He says he’s found a new sucker – I mean, given the composter to another gardener – and is just waiting for an opportune occasion to deliver it.
Meanwhile, it sits there useless and unattractive and going nowhere, so durable and eternal you wonder how in hell anybody ever got the idea that heavy-duty industrial-grade plastic was a suitable medium for organic decomposition.
Well. I begin to sound a bit shrill, even to myself. It shouldn’t surprise me by now not to be listened to. I am married. In any case, I have given myself the satisfaction of reposting my first compost article below, as well as the second column which I don’t believe I have ever put on this blog site.
I don’t suppose anyone will pay any more attention than they did the first time. I expect everyone thinks I am just talking a lot of rot.
END
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