And there's location

I forgot to mention something that actually was quite important to Pete: location of the bins. I had reasonably assumed that locating the bin close to the house, making it convenient, would be a good thing. It was a good thing -- for the mice. In fact, it was a very good thing for the mice who found the bin and then found their way under my kitchen sink. I won't post a picture of what that area looked like, but trust me, it was no where as neat and tidy as the picture I am posting. (Note: I think the white-footed mouse is our culprit.)

I rapidly moved the bin to an edge of our property. I called the Village first though. Depending on where you live, your town/city/village may have views, codes or opinions on composting. The nice fellow who answered my call told me Glenview didn't have anything in writing, but he was all for the attempt.

And that's why the bin is shown far from the house in a picture posted earlier, and that's also why Pete had some hesitation about me bringing a bin indoors -- the vermicomposter. As you shall see, he was overcome by logic and cuteness.

(Jumping ahead -- I put the vermicomposter in the laundry room. That's on the same level as our family room, but no one would ever know it. My mom, who has a nose in a million, never made a comment when she was here a few weeks ago.)

Three composters later,

Pete claims we haven't yet harvested usable compost, although it's 5 years, 3 composters, and pounds and pounds of organic trash stashed under our kitchen sink later.

Turns out, he's partially right. Composting can be very easy -- you can cold compost, which involves a minimum of effort. You basically dump your organic waste in a designated area (which has light and rain) and come back many months later to find composted material. There's no temperature-taking, no balancing of green and brown waste, no plunging your hands into the center of the mess to stir things up. That's how I started, and it's a slow process.

A really slow process.

And sometimes squirrels chew on the bin (especially if you dump in only green waste and forget to cover it with brown).

So I went and did the only thing a lazy composter could do -- I purchased another bin. A much more expensive bin. (I went about it in a smart way, though, showing the experience of a long-married woman: I convinced Pete to buy it for me for Mother's Day. He felt -- well, if not good about it, at least he felt in control of the purchase -- and I excitedly began reading about tumbler composting.)

And then quite a bit later...

We moved to Glenview in 1998. I had been modestly gardening in the city for 2 years, but now I had a whole quarter acre to play with -- and because our house is tiny, I had almost the entire plot as a playground.

Old Lady Ill (yes, that was her name) had been a gardener too, but I didn't let that stop me. I pulled out her iris and her hens & chicks. I enlarged her back plot, removed some groundcover around a tree and made that into a garden, too. By the time I signed up for my first class at the Chicago Botanic Garden, I had convinced my husband to remove the overgrown hedges in the front of the house, removed squares of lawn for roses and coreopsis, and taught the girls that corn grows on a stalk, not in a grocery store.

But that first class at the CBG would be Pete's undoing, because that first class was all about composting. It was called "Mulch," but only the first 10 minutes was spent on that stuff you can buy in plastic bags at Home Depot. The rest of the discussion centered on making the gold at home. It turned out I had everything I needed to create plant food at home, except a hideously expensive, recycled plastic black composter that cost a mortgage to ship from my favorite Gardeners Supply Company.

In the beginning...

A long time ago, I didn't like dirt, worms, gardening, noxious odors, or decaying material. I liked my carbon in paper form, neatly bound, preferably containing a beguiling story about horses and a young girl.

Then I went to law school. I had kids. I learned to appreciate the concrete world around me, not the fantasy world in a book. And then I found gardening books, and my nirvana was complete.

So the truth is I didn't set out to compost, much less compost with worms. After politely ignoring my mother's love of plants for 26 years, I began gardening in the tiny front court of our coach house off Addison, more as a way to fill the time before the beginning of law school than as a bona fide interest. A casual purchase of red salvia from a neighborhood Walgreens turned into using my brother's car during his honeymoon as a vehicle for plant purchase from farther afield. By the time I had grown my first sunflowers taller than Pete, I was hooked.