Guerilla Composting

I was shocked to discover this morning, (when trying to find a local compost heap for the organic scraps I had separated from yesterdays course waste) that there is in fact NO COMPOSTING BEING DONE HERE AT ALL!

Even the weeds plucked from the immaculate gardens here are all sent to landfill. (Read with a gasp of horror!) Well, you can take a waste reduction educator away from her work for a while but you can’t make her send organic matter to landfill!

Not when I know that the bucket of food scraps I collected today could generate at least 20kgs of greenhouse gas if left to fester away in the anaerobic environment of a landfill. Not to mention the nasty toxic leachate it turns into –with the potential to contaminate land and underground water reserves. Don’t even get me started on the impacts of soil degradation and erosion…..

So, I cooked up a plan (with Sky as my willing assistant) to start a secret compost somewhere on site to deal with the organic scraps. I discovered just in time that this blog is being read by locals (hello!) so decided to move my guerilla compost off site so as not to be evicted. When relaying this story to Bill he shared his experience of getting in trouble here last year for donating some liquid nitrogen to a local tree….

Anyway, after going out for a lovely meal at Zum Zum (where I offered a bored Sky 10 cents for every word she could make out of PERMACULTURE and 20 cents for each word if she could come up with over 25 – she came up with over 30!)
We searched our room and luggage for anything resembling a spade or similar digging implement for our late night composting mission.

The best we could come up with was a couple of travel spoons which were not very big. We took our bucket, spoons, dark glasses and camera for a brisk walk around Melbourne depositing some juicey organic matter into every little spoon dug trench and hole we made. We felt both virtuous and naughty all at the same time!

NB No soil was harmed during the making of this blog.