Now before you get the wrong idea, I will say that I have been doing a lot around the house: organizing the garage, putting weatherstripping around the front door, weeding, removing all of the window screens and sweeping off the spiderwebs and cleaning the exterior glass, doing a deep clean of corners that I didn't get to in the initial move-in clean (white vinegar is the most amazing all-purpose cleaning tool--and cheap too!).
Two large, ongoing projects are the back yard and the compost pile.
As you can see in the photo, the backyard looks pretty ratty. Partly it's a lack of TLC but the hippies that lived here before me made some rather odd choices. They were really into gardening. They build up a large garden plot, perhaps 300 square feet in size, at one end of the yard. It is mounded, rising up a good 6 inches or more above the ground level. The soil there is of much better quality than the rest of the yard and it has obviously been amended by compost (more on that below). But you can't make a garden out of compost alone--you still need a lot of dirt too. Where did they get the dirt? They dug it out of the rest of the yard! No, not from a single, large hole. That would have been too sensible. They took shovelfuls from the rest of the yard in a checkerboard pattern. Ah! Now the shitty yard begins to make a bit more sense.
So one of my projects is moving the soil from the garden mound back to its original location in the rest of the yard, bucket by bucket. This is not the Sisyphean task that it sounds like. In the areas where I started the dirt relocation, the yard is already looking better. In the fall, when it begins to rain again, I'll scatter grass seed and fertilizer. Perhaps by next spring, the yard will begin to look halfway decent.
The hippies also set up an open compost pile in a "box" created by three wooden pallets nailed together. They took fairly good care of it but it hasn't been turned since they left and the landlady dumped a bunch of large, chunky crap in there when she did a clean up before I got here. There's probably a solid three cubic feet of cured compost at the bottom ready to go, but there's a similar volume of crap on top that hasn't been composted yet.
Turning an open compost pile like that isn't trivial. And if you aren't too picky about what you toss in there (the hippies weren't--I've encountered entire and unrotted potatoes, eggshells, avocado rinds, etc., which means whenever I approach the bin, the dogs get very interested because stuff like that is fricking treasure, I tell you), then you need to screen the large chunks out before you use it (you return them to the pile; they aren't wasted). When turning it, you need a place to put the uncomposted stuff from the top layer, another work location to do the screening of the bottom layer, and a screen. I've got a trip to Home Depot planned for the afternoon to pick up a tarp, some 1" x 2" wood for a frame, which I will build, and metal mesh, and I'll be in compost business by the weekend.
Getting more raw material for the bin isn't a problem. I cook most of my meals from scratch and I eat a lot of vegetables. Pretty much the only prepared products I use are tomatoes and tuna. Just in the process of my daily eating schedule, I generate a lot of organic matter--good, clean bits ready for the compost bin. Think of all the lovely stuff just waiting for a new life in the composter: garlic clove paper, onion tops, ends of zuccinis and carrots, spinach leaf stems, mango rinds, tea bags. I've got plenty of yard waste too, like grass clippings and leaves. You have to have the right balance of things, can't just toss in anything (like whole potatoes, sheesh, silly hippies). It will be good to put all that stuff to some use rather than throwing it out with my non-recycling trash.
Unfortunately, you can't put dog poop in a household compost bin. It doesn't get hot enough to kill parasites and harmful bacteria. Don't want to be scattering E. coli around the yard now, do we? Poop, and cat litter cleanings, have to go out bagged in my curbside trash bin.
Of course I spend plenty of time dozing in the fresh air of the back yard with the dogs, but only after I spend a morning of hard work making this place a little more comfortable.
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