Waste Not

I just spent a happy half hour digging three barrowfuls of compost out of our kitchen-waste compost bin. The main driver for this was there being so little room at the top that something had to come out of the bottom.

Some of the goodness has doubtless leached out in the several months the stuff had to rot down, but it looks good and smells ok - I love the way gardeners talk about how good compost smells 'sweet'. It was dumped on one of the raised beds in which we grow (in the main) salad stuff, heavier duty crops being reserved for the allotment.

There is something immensely pleasing about how the bits of veg peelings, fruit skins, and the odd dose of chicken poo (great accelerator) can turn into such useful and free material for future crops. It was full of worms too, some of them now being turned into eggs in the innards of our hens who were out when I was doing this.

Free Firelighters

Well, firelighters that are free if you prepare them while cooking a stew.

Somebody told us the other day that lemon and lime skins when dried out slowly make good firelighters. Sounds odd, but when you think of how hard a lime forgotten in the fruit bowl goes, it makes a bit more sense. We tried it, and it works a treat. One fewer thing  to compost, but free firelighters seems like a good enough trade off.

I have to remember two things here - one not to throw the juiced halves in the compost bin; two to put them in the oven when a stew is being cooked. Not too hard, and they smell better than those white petroleum-wax things too.