Ha, the thread lives on.

Take that GardenWeb!!!!

And Val, you do rule!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You people really are Whackos... I mean Wackos... I mean Enthusiasts, aren't you?

And I DON'T rule! I just like to have FUN and learn things along the way. I don't think I'm going to live long enough to try all the new things I've learned from all the good people here. So many new ideas and different ways of doing things. It's truly amazing.

If we could just convince some people that their way isn't the only way, this place would be Eden....of course.....it wouldn't be near as much fun (insert EVIL laugh here).

Val

bump - nudge

Since I am a newbie to the forum, but not a compost newbie, can I ask a question?

How did you all "become" composter enthusiastics (whackos)? Have you just done is forever, was it a gradual thing, or did you just jump in as a newbie and never look back?

I'll start. I grew up in a gardening family. Some of my earliest memories are of one of my daily chores, taking all the daily kitchen scraps out to the "worm pile". My dear grandpa was an avid fisherman, and we had a pile between the back yard and the garden where we dumped scraps and he dug tons of worms for his fishing habit. We also used some of the "dirt" the worms lived in to topdress some of the things in the garden.

We also dumped all the coffee grounds (from back in the days of perculator coffee pots) on my grandma's flower beds and she had some of the most beautiful flowers around!

So I guess composting has always been in my blood, even though for various reasons throughout the years, I have not actively composted.

Now I am making a "comeback", in hopes to give my granddaughters some of the same fond memories I have, and give them some great homegrown veggies in the process.

Now tell us your stories:)

Sassy

Hey Sassy -

What a good question! Your story and mine are very similar. My grandparents always had a garden as long as I can remember. My grandparents also liked to fish and had a worm bin in their back yard. Instead of a pile he dug one into the ground and lined it with block (at least the sides). It stuck out of the ground about a foot and had a double sided lid on it. Up until a few years ago, my grandma was the gardener and canner for the family. We would help her of course but she was the main one in charge.

A few years ago I decided that since she was getting older I needed to start doing these things for myself. I started out small by planting a few tomato and green pepper plants. They grew okay but nothing spectacular. So I had my husband buy me a gardening book for Christmas. There was a chapter in the back of the book about composting. Now to take a quote from Sunny: You have to DO stuff to your dirt. Who knew??? The rest is history.

Val

Hi all
I started gardening back in the early 80's in the first house I bought. My parents were not gardeners, so I actually had no experience what so ever. My kids were young and I wanted to grow veggies for them. Actually what really motivated me were a few TV shows, Square foot gardening and another show I can't remember the name of now, but it focused on Organic Gardening. Long story short, I had my hubby help me make garden beds, and slowly but surely I got into composting also.

At this house, I have again square foot beds made, along with trellis's attached to the beds, and compost all year long. We shred the fall leaves with the lawn mower and add them to the beds, any left overs are added to the 3 compost bins I have. Occasionally we will get horse manure, and compost that also, but not for the last few years or so, and thats because we are just getting old and can't do all the shoveling. All fruit and veggie wastes get added to the piles all year long also, when the piles are frozen, they just sit til I can get out there in the spring and turn them or my DH will do it. So, yes, I enjoy gardening, and composting and thats how I got started, LOL

Alberta

I grew up in a little house in a big city, it had a tiny yard. My parents had a few shrubs and perennials and planted a few annuals and tomatoes every year. I'm certain they never heard of compost so I didn't either.

When my husband and I bought this house, our first, in 1983, it had no landscaping, no trees, and I wanted plants and flowers to dress it up. I planted a few things and they grew reasonably well. Available time was limited as I was a young working wife and Mom in a demanding career. I obtained a garden book or two where I read about compost (Al Gore had yet to invent the internet, and home computers were still someone's dream) and searched for a bin. For many years it was a slow passive thing and I harvested one small batch of compost per year.

Time passed, my son grew up and moved away. I cut down to part time work and my available gardening time increased. My access to the internet expanded my knowledge and interest in gardening and composting, and here I am.

Karen

My Okie father, who was born in 1910, composted his whole life, as had both his dustbowl farmer parents before him, so I figure that my family has been composting continually for well over a century. (When someone was in college or in WWII, some other family member was running a pile somewhere.) In almost 56 years, I have only lived in one home that didn't have a compost pile---during a nine month stint I spent in Boston once.

In the summer when we went to our camp, we put our compostables into a bottom-less trash can that my father sank into the ground. That was in operation for fifty years until an overenthusiastic snowplow guy plowed well into our back yard and drove it out of the ground. The lid was unscathed and I still have it. For some reason, my father or someone stamped a neat "1945" into it.

The bin in our backyard at home was a three-sided, wooden box about 5 feet x 10. We dropped our household debris into the bin from the garden crib above it. When my father (the gardener) died, my brother, mother and I continued to add to what my family called the "mulch pile", but we never harvested from it. It was just the way we managed waste. For years and years.
I moved out and began to compost at my new apartment.

When my mother moved in the 80s I moved the contents of the bin along with her other household items. I planted a garden with some of my father's plants---Blue Flag and Solomon's Seal and bluebells---and used all of the compost in the new garden. Someone gave me a huge wooden box from Lockheed and I set it up at the new place for my mother's new bin. My stepfather later built another bin 5' x 8. Over time we added three mobile, wire bins.

I have five bins going now here at our former cottage, plus an area about 7'x 20' that is under three feet of packed leaves and grass clippings, an area that will be planted someday. I covered an area about 15'x20 last year under about 50 bags of leaves, about, I can't really remember, I think over 50 pumpkins, six contractor's bag of seaweed, four bales of rotten hay, and a few bags of pine needles. It's shocking how much that shrank by summer's end. It's good looking stuff, though, so I thought that I should head to another area. I'm going to heavily mulch that area with chicken house litter this spring and plant something there.

Wow, great stories. I love reading them. Thanks, everyone:)

Sassy

I worked overseas where they didn't have trash collection. Everything was either eaten by chickens/goats, composted, or reused for something else - tin cans were hammered out for roofing tiles, all glass jars reused for something, etc.

The exception was cheap plastic bags, which will take over the world one day.

My mom and dad were the first generation in the family lines that went back to the late 1700's who weren't farmers. I'm sure that if my dad were alive he sure would enjoy this web site.

Well, this is my first year to be serious about growing vegetables. We have about an acre with a fourth of it in a pond, sandy soil, deer roaming at night, a few new neighbor cats on the loose -- so my bird bath is vacant and no birds will stay. I'm pretty sure that the happiest bird I ever heard, a Mocking bird, got eaten by one of those cats. Anyway, I plan on treating those cats real nice if you know what I mean. Last year I counted ten bird nests in our trees and bushes and now there is not a bird to be seen or heard. The compost bin is covered so the vultures can't get in, and there will be nets protecting everything from the deer. I'm starting an insectuary to attract beneficial insects for the garden and citrus grove. My husband has taken over my compost bin with dead palm leaves and banana trunks and leaves. I have to start all over again and am not happy.

I think I'll just have to settle by making some compost tea with the manure compost I can buy and some alfalfa pellets, etc. I'll be reading in this forum for some ideas. I am determined to be organic.

Earliest I can remember about composting - I was 4 years old and my Dad gave me the job of throwing the horse poop balls back onto the pile of manure as he shoveled it into the compost bin.

Then around 5 years old, I 'graduated' to responsibility for pulling weeds out of the garden rows. Learned how to mulch with grass clippings pretty quick.

Fondest early memory of gardening was watching my Mom shoot pheasants in the garden with an old .22 single-shot.
We ate a lot of pheasant.

Then Dad moved us from Michigan to Texas, where he was able to compost and garden year-round. I shoveled a lot of poop and cut/bagged a lot of grass clippings (push mower) by the time I was a teenager - and learned a lot about veggies, too. Stuck with me through all these years and haven't stopped learning...

Gardening/Composting is the greatest hobby there is, in my book. Best tasting veggies, and grow what we like to eat.
Life is good when you garden...

I'm a compost newbie, but if everyone is doing the childhood memory thing, then by golly, so am I!
I grew up in a mountain tropical zone. My mom loved to garden.
I remember my older sister planting tomatoes the first time -- she just squished the tomato over the soil and next thing you know, the tomatoes were growing! I guess our soil was really fertile.
We used to pick bananas from the yard -- they just kept reproducing on their own, and chayote squash (I was sick of eating so many of them), and the young kleaves/tendrilsof sweet potatoes.
This composting thing is new to me though, and I'm still learning about it.

Okay, time to tell my story.

My grandfather was a farmer. I spent summers on his farm, hauling lumber, feeding farm animals, and discovering nature. Unfortunately as we grew older we grew apart. He sold the farm and I became less interested in farming and gardening as high school and college brought more "interesting" things to occupy my time.

My grandfather always kept a vegetable garden on his property, even to this day. My mom is a perennial gardener who mostly focuses on native and medicinal plants. In college I worked as a landscaper and eventually got back into gardening.

My love for gardening hit full force when I bought my first house. I knew that I needed to improve the soil and I that's how I discovered the wonders of compost. It really has changed my life, I think for the better.