From Compost to Compost

I've always taken a very relaxed approach to composting. If it's organic and it's not something the chickens find delectable, it goes in the pile.

Ten years ago, a friend gave me a copy of Joan Dye Gussow's lovely garden memoir This Organic LIfe.  Gussow is a longtime professor of nutrition at Columbia and a heroine to the sustainable food movement.  I admired many things about the book, mainly her love of good food and desire to be self-sufficient in her garden...but what delighted me most was her admission that she should have put a dead rat into the compost and not the garbage.

Seriously, isn't unsqueamish thriftiness what sustainability is all about?

 

Personally, I have composted neither rats nor relatives.  But I have composted an oriental rug that my puppy peed on one too many times to be salvageable qua rug.

I was very pleased to remove the composter a few days ago and find...compost, with just a few tufts of maroon wool.

What's the weirdest thing you've ever composted?

Comments

[Gail]

Nothing too interesting other than resting random items on my compost pile and then finding them 2-3 years later. A kitchen shears (lost again) and a hand tool it of course was an expensive one!
Birdhouse gourds do not seem to break down in compost piles.

[cellbioprof]

I compost field mice that we catch in our basement, eating the sweet potatoes we are trying to store for the winter.
I have also composted wild animals that are road-killed.
And during the growing season (i.e., when it's warm enough to urinate in a bucket in the garden shed) I add my liquid urea to the pile.
And Joan Gussow is anything but weird - she is an incredibly intelligent, passionate, and charming person whom I had the good fortune to talk with for more than 30 minutes at the Mother Earth News Fair in PA in October.

[Autumn]

Well, I can't think of anything weird offhand that I've tried to compost, but I did recently finish the book "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach...and now I know that I want my 'remains' to be freeze-dried and turned into compost/fertilizer. Check it out here: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-ecological-burial-involves-freeze-drying-composting.html

[Faith]

Mussel, oyster and clam shells go right into the compost to get cleansed and deoderized. I don't bother sifting them out before applying to the garden, preferably onto beds with potatoes, squash and other coarse plants. They take a while to break down, but after a season in the rain and sun the shells can be whacked with a metal tool and they shatter easily.

I'm guessing that my acidic soils can be improved by the lime and calcium and the marine isotopes benefit the plants, as well as the people who eat them.

[fern]

Hmm, i don't know, I have some concern about some of the items people have mentioned composting here.

the lint from vacuum cleaner bags will contain grit and sediment tracked in from outside. If you've walked on an asphalt driveway or through parking lots, it could contain bits of petroleum particles, no? that's how storm water runoff from paved surfaces pollutes our waterways.

I also wouldn't compost clothing. How do you know what dyes or other chemicals may have been used in its production?

[hb]

A pair of nearly brand-new Felcos. Of course they did not compost; they rusted solid. :(