Have I crossed over the line?!?!?!?

So I brought a banana to work for lunch today...and instead of tossing the peel in the trash, I carefully placed it back in my lunch bag and carried it home to put it in my compost pile.

DH thinks I'm crazy...but a rind is a terrible thing to waste.

pam

That is awful, I mean the fact that your DH thinks your crazy. What's the matter with the man? grin

wow, I do this daily. I also bring home all the coffee grounds from work, and pick the dead leaves off people's plants to bring home. It's going to end up in the trash if i don't bring it home. I may be nuts, but my worms love me.

Not to worry, at church I collect the organic matter from the kitchen and rescue it to the compost pile. The man who carries the trash to the dumpster appreciates my efforts, less for him to haul.

Carolyn

DH thinks I'm crazy...but a rind is a terrible thing to waste.


bwahahahahahah!!!!

Environmental education programs teach kids to do just that - pack a "no garbarge lunch" by using reusable containers and packing the compostable items back to the compost pile. Nothing crazy about that at all in my book.

Way to go!

In fact a banana peel is such good plant food that I sometimes just stick it in a plant.i once had a humongous stag horn fern that I fed with banana peels.It was a monster.

No, you haven't crossed over the line...........there is lots of "hungry"dirt out there and our compost piles will often reward us with surprises. DH showed me something yesterday that looks like some type of lily growing in ours. Can't figure where it came from and will keep you posted as to what it really is.

Sorry to dissagree bugme, but phuggins has definitely crossed the line. Welcome to the club phugguns!

Ahh, crossing over the line. I get home from work and the first thing I do is check my seedlings and transplants, NOT the mail, NOT the answering machine, but my "babies" !!!! My wife thinks I'm losing it!

Doug

Yes, you have crossed the line from unenlightened to fully aware! You can never go back!

and the rind line would be a great t shirt saying for composting

I arrived home this morning with another truckload of bagged leaves I picked up in a nearby town. I was unloading them and looked up to see my wife on the deck watching me. She just shook her head and said, "I love you but you are a crazy man."


early_bloomer

Oh, I LOVE good compost. It's so good for my plants, it's so good for the soil, and the whole recycling thing appeals to my thrifty Yankee nature. :) One time I caught DH throwing coffee grounds --brace yourselves-- into the garbarge disposal. NOOOOOOOO. He hasn't done it again. :) But yeah, he does think I'm a little crazy.

I have to fess up, the rind quote isn't original...I saw it on a bumper sticker on the departmental botanist's office door. :)

pam

We are all kindred spirits :)

I do the same thing with other people's trash, just grab it right out of their hands, especially my daughter who lives by me. I also look in the trash can to see if there's anything there.

So here I am, the dead of night, rifling through the trash. Haven't hit dumpsters yet, but that will probably be next. Need t shirts that say "yes, I'm crazy"

"DUMPSTER RAT" with a cartoon rat will sell better. I will pay $19.95 and ship for the first one. Maybe the rat should be a Gargoil part human, part animal and part fish.

Your local sea food house may have crab shells, oyster shells and clam shells if you can get them sorted out from the steak bones. I know your organic supply houses all have these ground or crushed products.

PHEW--used to be a health inspector. Don't go anywhere near a seafood place dumpster in warm weather!
I think you really have to get chummy with the management first. Seems to me the biggest sticking point with commercial picking is that they will not want to make an effort to segreagte good from bad for you.

I'll buy a tshirt too

It is amazing what a pie or home baked loaf of bread will do to an owner cheff's mentality. They love it when a good customer shares from the heart. They love good food or they certainly would be in some other business.

So the key is to love the cheff and share your best a little along the way. Last summer I had some of those mini minature tomato plants. A half pint of them got me a five gallon bucket of shrimp shells. When I get giant tomato fruit I use it accordingly if it is less than competitive in my terms. They are always most pleased.

My daughter in law is planting her garden and she always plants a ton of tomatoes and stuff that would feed the whole city. So, I'll be there grabbing them as soon as they look the least bit over ripe.!!

Tomato seed do not decompose in compost or in municiple sludge either. Better to make sauce or juice and send the seeds downline to the sewage plant. :)

yes but those are the best tomato plants.. The ones grown in compost right!?? :)

Those seedlings just get covered up in my case. Some folks might not think as I think. I tramp them down and cover them with mulch......or pull them up. I sure do not want to work a whole summer and find my seedlings from hybrids are not good matters. Others might consider that fun.

I was digging in the compost pile the other day and I came across all these little seedlings. No telling what they are. I had potatoes come up last year.

I dug them up then threw them back in!!! Guess they composted, never came back!!

phuggins,

I might have one-upped you. I had five bananas sitting on my kitchen counter that were a day or two from spoiling, so this afternoon I made them into a banana milkshake. I then took the five brown spotted peels out to my sun room and buried them in a planter containing three small banana trees. Gotta love that extra potassium!

:)

The ultimate in banana recycling! Excellent :)

pam

I am a composting newbie, started my first bin only recently. I already took an old coffee can to work and have been filling it with my used tea bags, coffee grounds, etc, and taking it home weekly. I've tried to keep it a secret from most people since one younger girl caught me doing it and asked me what I was doing. When I explained, her main reaction was of disgust that I like to dig in the dirt anyway, let alone collect other people's "trash!" *sigh*
DH, however, has been fully supportive and even dug a banana peel out of the kitchen trash can he'd forgotten he'd thrown in there the day before. :) He grows tomatoes & peppers, I grow herbs and flowers, so he's almost on the band wagon entirely!

Nicole

I'm not sure, but isn't feeding your banana plant banana peels kinda like cannibalism? LOL!!! :)

sallyG...a former health inspector friend of mine use to tell some really unbeleavable stories about restaurants. One I remember was the black light used to inspect their flour for making roles to find evidence of mice or rat urine. None Passed! They discontinued. One of the primary reasons I decided to grow my own food and make my own bread...not to mention the daily increases in food prices at our friendly neighborhood grocery stores.

This topic is not one that most people would like to talk about, and I'm sure you could top that story, but I expond on the virtues of not eating in restaurants to my kids and they just look at me like I've lost it. The flip of it is, I haevn't had a cold or the flu in nearly four years and I feel great. I can't recall a time when either one or the other kids didn't have some bug.

Gee I hate to upset your stomach. However as a former home office employee of the largest white bread baker in America.........now based in Canada the facts are that all flour contains some rat and mouse poop. The amount permitted is very small. It is impossible to process it all out of flour.

Bread is baked in the range of 400 degrees. This kills any biology carried by or in any poop that may not have been screened or filtered out.

This could be eliminated by raising, processing and using your own flour from your own grain. Yet urine is even more difficult to eliminate than poop! In any event your best friend is a four hundred degree oven.

My best stories-- the nudis colony inspection. Lemme just say

hair nets

They gave me some beautiful irises.

Also got inside prison. Interesting.

My best stories-- the nudis colony inspection. Lemme just say

hair nets


*GAG*

OMG, that is TOO funny. :) how'd they stay on? Never mind, I probably don't want to know.

pam

Lookee! lookee! I'm growing composting trash bags ..........LOL

doccat5 - are you sure those aren't body bags? LOL!!!

Really, that is an amazing amount of bags - leaves? grass? Send me some?

I did that last year at the edge of the woods, and put leaves and grass and cow manure, thinking how smart I was. Forgot the bobcats and other stuff back there, so they got drug over about 20 miles probably.

Oh well, learned not to put the bags by the woods.! lol

Maybe the cats were trying to help you with your garden tasks?

DH has a buddy who does organic method landscaping and thinks this is a neat idea. We help provide bags, and gardening advice, and some finished compost. He provides the grass and leaves, so we are "cookin". The yard looks like a trash bag "farm" LOL

Who cares , your flowers will be so pretty.

Well, I swore I wouldn't but I broke down and brought 2 more truckloads of leaves home. I ran half of them through the shredder yesterday along with a bunch of my apple tree prunings and the gazillion branches that came out of my river birch trees over the winter. I now have quite a compost operation going.

early_bloomer

I've added a pile of apple chips, a pile of birch chips, a pile of shredded leaves and a pile of shredded plant material to my compost area. I'm planning on adding a load of chicken manure and a load of rotted horse manure to the mix as well. With the lawn clippings and vegetable waste I should have quite a batch of compost this year.

If I get this mixed up and going this spring will the wood chips be composed enough to be usable by next year?

early_bloomer

This message was edited Apr 20, 2008 7:10 PM