Trudging through the snow

When we decided to try to go greener for 2008, one of the things I knew we’d have to keep doing was composting during the winter. This is the first winter we’ve tried to keep the compost bin in use. Usually by the time there is this much snow on the ground, I throw in the towel and stop composting until the spring. But after writing the Garbage Diaries, and realizing how much of our waste could be composted, it seemed like a huge step backward to go back to throwing our green waste into the trash.

It’s been more challenging than I thought it would be. The snow is thigh-high in our back yard, and both of our big black bins are covered with snow. The trip out our back door and down our deck stairs is treacherous because we haven’t been clearing them regularly and each step has a nice icy slope on it.

With a toddler in the house, one has to do the trip to the bin when one’s spouse is at home because said toddler cannot be left unattended, and there is no way I’m schlepping her AND the overflowing compost bin across the frozen tundra of our back yard. That’s meant a few days where the stuff destined for the composter is piling up on our kitchen counter, but hopefully that won’t happen very often.

And in the spring, we’ll have some nice nutrient rich compost for our garden. That is if the squirrels that live in the tree behind our house don’t eat everything in the compost bin before then.