Composting!

I got about 100 gallons of good soil out of the compost pile (around 20 fillings of a five-gallon bucket). Dirt for free! You can see my setup in the photo below. It was time consuming but not particularly difficult work.

The pile was full of enormous worms, most of which I returned to the bin. The dirt has been scattered around the yard, filling many of the annoying holes. The volume of the pile is reduced by over two-thirds. The stuff that is left is too wet (bad hippies for not turning the pile often enough) or too coarse--not ready to use yet. But getting everything turned and adding some fresh material will take care of both problems.

While I was screening the pile (I am wearing rubber gardening gloves and simply rubbing the stuff over my spiffy screen; if it's dirt, it falls through, and if it isn't ready, it doesn't), I extracted a few pounds of peach pits, corn cobs, whole potatoes, and enormous squash stems, none of which will readily break down in this kind of compost bin. Seriously, whole potatoes. Some of them were even sprouting. What the hell where those hippies thinking? Composting is an amazingly simple yet powerful biological process but there are limits to what you can accomplish with it in your backyard.