The Art of Zen Living

Wednesday, I went to a class on worm composting at the Eco-living Center, at Rutenburg park.  It turned out to be a lot of fun, and on top of that I learned how to build a bin for worm composting.  I’ll tell you a bit about what happened, and then share with you what I learned about making a worm bin, and some of the benefits of Worm Composting.

Worms eat plant based organic waste, and excrete highly concentrated plant food.  Organic waste includes food scraps, leaves, newspaper, junk mail, sawdust, cardboard, seaweed - if it was a plant but now it’s garbage, the worms will eat it.  If you’re a gardener, the benefits are obvious.  It’s also a great project if you have kids.  Or if you fish, you’ll have a steady supply of worms.  You may also just like being kind to random plants - seeing as how they keep us provided with oxygen, it can’t hurt to drop a little extra grow juice on them from time to time, even if it’s just in a random manner!

*The picture is of a sculpture in front of the Eco-living center, called “climb every mountain”.  It has no relevance to this post other than being a pretty cool picture.

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It’s been two weeks since I first piled up my clippings, yard waste, and some kitchen scraps, sprinkled it all with a bit of (crappy) Florida dirt, soaked the whole thing in water and went away and let it sit.  And sit it did!  It didn’t seem to be doing much of anything.  Well, that’s not completely true.  I learned that you really can’t put bread into a compost pile unless you soak it in water and puree it, then dump it on when you water the pile.  If you just tear it up and think burying it in the middle of the pile will keep the birds from finding it, you’d be wrong.  I still don’t know who was more startled - that poor blue jay that popped it’s head out with a big crust of bread and saw me hovering over him, or me, when that head popped out wings all a flapping and beak all a squawking.  Suffice to say it was a rather unique moment, and I felt very much in the now.  I also screamed like a school girl.

I digress.  Two weeks yesterday I set my compost pile up at a total cost of about $4.25.  3 tomato stakes, about 7 feet of a 50 foot roll of plastic fencing, and a few twist ties.  A little American ingenuity, a little America frugality, and we were ready to go.

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As the philosopher Jagger once said, you can’t always get what you want.  He did, however, go on to point out that if you try, sometimes, you get what you need.

The problem, as I see it, is that these days, Americans not only get what they need, they get what they want, but they think they need what they want.  We live in an economy created by marketing where items are designed to wear out, break or just become unusable due to the design of this year’s products being different.  We cash in for credit cards, look to our home equity as a “free money ATM”, and constantly chase The Next Big Thing.  We’re conditioned to react this way, pretty much since birth.  We accumulate more and more stuff, rent out rooms for our stuff, buy special storage containers to keep it nice, hire consultants or purchase special shelving units to turn closest into stuff-o-rama storage.

Let me put that last part a different way: we buy stuff FOR our stuff, so that our stuff will have a place to live.

I just got tired of living that way.

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One of the things I’ve been excited about since I moved into the new place what that I would be able to plant a garden.  We put a small strawberry patch in out front, and I’ve been working semi-diligently to get an area in the back cleared of grass, edged and free of rocks.  I’m sure we’ll be talking more about some of the details of the garden as I learn more about it.  A good example is the dirt.  I know it looks nice and dark and fertile, but it isn’t.  Today I just want to talk a little about the benefits of having a garden, and tell you a little about what I’m doing with mine.  I promise, no more bold, colored words in this post - I just wanted to get a little color into the front page.

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