- Composting
- Posts
- The Year in Decay
This week, the first compost in the west bin since last spring, and the last compost glamor shot of 2024: grapes, peppers, banana peels, melon, onion, garlic peels, eggshells, coffee grounds, oranges.
What is there to say about a year of composting? Nothing at all, other than imagining with relish the next year of composting. Think of all the things not even grown yet, which will end up in your compost bin! They don’t even know the glorious decay awaiting them, and you, and me. Happy new year.
The noble medieval farmer and his noble medieval compost bin.
Lately when it comes to video games, I’m drawn to chill play that activates zero fast-twitch muscle fiber. It’s either grand strategy, where I may contemplate vast forces at play over aeons, or virtual replication of largely mundane tasks in another era, like a medeival guy doing a farm. And not a jokey cartoon farm where I have to make enough coconuts to pay off my raccoon debt or whatever.
That’s what made me start Medieval Dynasty, a sort of lite RPG with village sim management elements along with crafting and survival et cetera. Plus, if you die, you live on as your descendants. But guess what! There’s composting!
You need fertilizer to farm, and one way to make fertilizer is using a compost bin to produce “rot.” You make rot by leaving edible material in your compost bin, where it magically and instantly transforms at the turn of each season. At first I had to pick 600 berries to fill my composter, which was a bit of a grind I must admit, and I like berries. Fortunately, now my crops are banging out plenty of excess to toss in the composter such that I have all the rot I can use, and then some.
Big brass ring aspiration for 2025 is to buy a pig so I can use the manure for fertilizer. But I’ll still compost my crop overage, because that’s the virtuous way of the frugal peasant. A proper frugal grindset for the ages.
