cucumber peels, dryer lint, toenail clippings, jell-o and coffee grinds
So yesterday the boys and I went to an Earth Day Celebration in the city. We had a great time riding in on the light rail train and then taking a trolley-like bus to the celebration. They had booths from lots of city and county services about keeping the water clean and recycling and conservation landscaping and using public transit, etc. They also had booths for all kinds of "green" products and services. It was great to learn about all the programs going on the in area to make Charlotte a better place to live. (Makes me sad that we'll be leaving it soon.) But I love the irony - the water conservation people were telling me to throw away food scraps (not use my disposal) and to use paper products instead of dishes on weekends, but the landfill people were telling me not to throw away so much stuff and not to use disposable products.
But my favorite was a natural/organic lawn care service. They use vermicomposting (composting with worms) to create a nutrient-rich soil that's really good for plants. They had a bin of the worm castings at their booth so people can feel for themselves how rich the soil is. The man was telling me how the castings are all natural and completely harmless. Coulson was playing with the dirt in the bin and a girl came up and also started playing in it. I know a little bit about worm composting because I'm planning to start doing it when we move, but I'm a plain-English kind of person, so I ask the man, "Isn't 'castings' just a fancy word for something else?" He tried to dodge the question at first, but then he saw the devious smile on my face and admitted that yes, it's worm poop. At this time, the little girl's mother walks up and asks her daughter about the dirt. She turns around and smiles and says, "It's worm poop." Confused, her mother says, "Worm Food?" The man is busy talking to someone else, and since I love this kind of stuff, I gladly volunteer, "Oh, no, it's worm POOP." Oh, the horrified look on the mother's face as she grabbed her daughter's hand and went straight for a sanitized wipe. At this point the man steps in with his "harmless" talk, but the mother, furiously rubbing her child's hands raw, shakes her head and says, "No, she bites her nails, this is not good..." I got a great laugh!
Vermicomposting was the highlight of the day. The guys from that booth did a demonstration on composting with worms and then helped the kids make their own mini-vermicomposter. You can feed these worms almost anything (except fats and protiens) and they'll turn it into super-soil for you. We had already decided to do a family sized vermicomposter when we moved to our new house, but now Coulson has this mini-compost bin to help us get started.
Coulson likes it a lot, but I think Casey and I are more excited about it. But that's probably just because he hasn't caught on to the fact that worm composting is all about worm poop. Once he figures that part out, he'll love it!
