Bow before the most majestic compost bins in all Bulgaria.
Bow, I said. Why aren’t you bowing? Oh, fuck it, here they are:
 |
| Compost bins of glory. |
Look, I know compost bins aren’t all that exciting, and I
understand I may be pushing the envelope in terms of how much tosh you guys
will actually read. But hear me out. For four years we’ve heaped our kitchen
waste, ash and rotten wood in a neglected bit of the garden (right next to the
chain link fence that separates us from our neighbours. Poor neighbours.).
That’s four years of looking at this:
 |
| Bleurgh. |
To make matters worse, last autumn we gathered up all our
leaves to make leaf mould (instead of burning them, as we had before, which is
a terrible waste). So that’s six months of looking at this:
 |
| Eeeesh. |
I’d had enough. The bin bags broke me. I realise I’m an
anally retentive neat freak but surely no one wants to look at a heap of bin
bags in their garden?
It was a couple of days’ work to get the bays set up and
filled, which is a long time when there’s so much else to do in the garden. But
now that it’s done, I don’t know why we didn’t do it years ago. Even Rob has
decided they’re glorious, and he’s very much a just-heap-it-up-in-the-corner-of-the-garden
kind of chap.
 |
| Sieving out usable compost. |
 |
| Evidence of woollen long johns in the heap. Curiously, these are not ours. |
 |
| Barney watches from a pear tree. Don't even get me started on how much pruning we need to do. |
 |
| Stara Planina mountains. Makes for a hilly garden but lovely views. |
We have one big bay for compost that’s rotting down. (We’re
not big on turning compost from one bay to another, mainly because we are lazy,
so we just heap it up and let it rot down slowly.) Then the smaller bay is for
compost that’s ready to use – this is a small pile because we’ve just spread a load
on the veg beds. May I say how nice it is not having to rummage through the big
heap looking for ready-to-use compost? It’s, like, really nice. Then we have two
leaf mould bays: one for last year’s leaves, and one empty bay for this year’s
leaves. By next year, the first lot will have rotted down and been used in the
garden, leaving us with an empty bay for the next lot of leaves. And so on.
That’s the idea anyway. We’ll add more bays in future if we need to but, for
now, this lot will do nicely. Isn’t organising stuff fun? It sure is.
 |
| *Pirate voice* black gold! |
I feel I should reward you for putting up with all this talk
of compost, which is, after all, just rotted down shite from my kitchen. So
sorry about that. Will these do?
 |
| It's the Melon Lada. Obviously. |
 |
| How do you fix a car in Bulgaria? Just prop it up on its side with a tyre. It'll be totally fine. Honest. |
 |
| Smug Pepper. |
