Robbie: Is that a rutabaga in our backyard?
Cassi:(sheepishly) uh.....yes.
Robbie:How did it get there?
Cassi: uh.....I sort of rolled it out the dog door a few weeks ago.
Robbie pauses for a moment to take this in.
Robbie: Why?
Cassi: Well, that extra one you bought a while back ended up going bad and I felt guilty for wasting it. Since we don't have a compost pile yet, I thought I would roll it out into the snow and it would eventually decompose.
Robbie: Do you know how long it will take a rutabaga that big to decompose, especially in the snow?
Cassi: No.
Robbie: A long time.
Cassi: Well, Janet said she throws her food waste straight into her yard during the winter.
Robbie: But at least Janet has a private backyard - not a backyard with a chainlink fence and only a few feet away from the neighbor's door!
Cassi: Point taken.
This conversation occurred a few weeks ago and every time I think about it now, it makes me giggle. Mainly because it contains the word rutabaga, which is inherently funny. I did eventually remove the offending rutabaga from the yard when the snow melted (along with a huge amount of dog poop of various bright colors and textures, depending on what object Kenya had eaten that day. Our poor, poor neighbors.)
Sure rolling a large vegetable out a dog door seems silly, but in my defense 1) Pregnancy and breastfeeding remove brain cells 2) I'm sleep deprived and 3) Just yesterday I read an article in Sierra Club magazine about a guy who made a compost bin, but it got infested by rats - so he tried vermicomposting (worms) and it got infested with fruit flies. As a last resort, he started packaging food waste in newspapers and putting them in the freezer without telling his wife.
So Robbie...it could be worse.
Friday, March 13, 2009
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2 comments:
Funny thing to me is that as Drew and I read this, we weren't sure which one of us would have been you and which would have been Robbie- could have easily gone either way.
We have a ravine behind our house that we were pitching things into...then we started worrying about bears. What's worse- that we throw old food in a big ditch or that we have bears?
Hmmm...bears are not a problem in Ann Arbor (although there are some giant squirrels with bad attitudes that can compare). When it comes to bears, I would err on the side of caution. Unless you have a neighbor you don't like, in which case you can dump your food in the ditch behind their house and see what happens.
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