Composting when chookless by Author Paul Carter MD

Compost
by Author Paul Carter MD

 

The animal ablation programme that accompanied our move off the farm left us sheepless and cowless. It also left us chookless. Issues associated with being sheepless and cowless were easily resolved by trips to the local Coles, but being chookless left us with a pile of unwanted kitchen scraps. I asked Siri what we should do, and she suggested we start composting. I thanked her for her help and then hopped onto Google to find out how to do it.

I had always imagined making compost to be a simple and straightforward activity, but I was wrong. Over several late nights, I learnt that it was essential to focus on not only the balance of green stuff, brown stuff, nitrogen, microorganisms, pH, calcium, phosphate, and potassium, but also on oxygen levels and moisture content. I also learnt that every type of container ever invented is either brilliant or useless, depending on which site you are looking at, and that turning them over can be seen as either essential or forbidden.

In the end, I got so confused by it all that I simply went to the local hardware store and bought a rotating bin on the recommendation of the very nice man behind the counter, who invited me to come back if I needed any further help.

The bin has now sat at the back of our new house for several months, and each day we open it up and put in our waste. Until a couple of weeks everything seemed to be going well, and then the bin suddenly became an olfactory biohazard. I gagged when I opened the lid, and made sure that there were no brown dogs within twenty paces.

On a compost chat group that evening, I learned that I probably didn’t have enough brown stuff in my mix, so I chucked in all the shredded paper from my office, with no benefit whatsoever, and then half a bag of sugar cane mulch. For two days all was good again, and I was starting to congratulate myself on my newly acquired composting skills, but the very next day the bin went back to smelling like the foetid corpse of a very large animal at the end of a heat wave.

I phoned the hardware shop, said that I thought my chemicals were all out of kilter, and asked for help. It wasn’t my first salesman on the phone, but another fellow, who was just as helpful. He suggested I bring in a specimen of fluid and he would test it for me and advise me what to do.

‘Now that’s what I call being thorough,’ I said to Gilly, and I went out and tipped up the bin, drained a little  fluid out, and headed round to the shop with my specimen to meet my Good Samaritan.

‘Holy Moley!’ he said as I handed him the jar. ‘Even before I do any tests, I already know one thing,’ he added as he leaned forward and whispered in my ear, ‘until I get this sorted out for you, just you make sure that no-one gets even close to your swimming pool.’