Winter just won't give up

I have to make a correction. After sharing the last blog post with Drew he corrected me, that this is not a "little fruit farm". He wanted me to correct the last post to read "this magnificent 80-acre fruit-laden eden at the center of the universe".... we agreed on "magnificent 80-acre fruit farm"

As I also mentioned in the last post, my compost pile has been long neglected this winter. I just couldn't bring myself to bundle up and trudge out through the knee deep snow to dump my veggie scraps in the heap. The weather was nice enough the other night that I decided to venture out and see what was happening with the pile. At some point over the winter the cover had blown off the composter and now that the snow had melted I was able to find it and put it back on.


To give a little background, this is my first attempt at composting. I received a compost bin for my birthday last July and I set it up in a place that I thought was covenient to both the garden and the house...made complete sense at the time. What I failed to take into account was where the spring bulbs were planted. As you can see, I maganed to plop my bin down right into the middle of a row of daffodils. I tried scooting the bin myself but it didn't budge. Hopefully with some help I can move it out of the row of flowers and still salvage the flowers if not for this year, perhaps next.

I had been saving some scraps for a day or two and so I added my fresh scraps to the bin. As the pile hadn't been touched in a couple of months I thought I would give it a good stir. I really hoped that underneath the top layer of brown leaves I would find some beautiful compost....

Nope, just more brown leaves. It was quite disappointing really. I am surprised how much it all has broken down and decomposed though. I have filled this bin 3 or 4 times with leaves, apple smashings (from the cider press), veggie peels etc and it is currently only half full.

After the disappointing venture to the compost pile I took a walk out to the skeleton of last years vegetable garden. The tall stalks you see are last year's okra plants. Like so many things around here, last year was our first attempt at a vegetable garden. In many ways it was quite a success (this okra is about 20 times taller than the plants we grew in Drew's parents garden the year before), in other ways it was a dismal failure - we lost a majority of our harvest to weeds overtaking the garden. I had to laugh when I ventured out here. I thought the patches of green that you see might be plants starting to come back... another NOPE. It's grass. The grass is growing up better in our garden than it is where we planted it in the yard!

On a final disappointing note, I didn't have to wait until the end of the week to be proved wrong about wintery precipitation. We had a pretty big ice storm last night and awoke this morning to everything covered in a half inch of ice. Winter just will not give up!