Compost is taking over my life (and my freezer)

I know a lot of posts lately have started with a well, I never thought I’d be HERE theme but come on: that is me shoveling into a pile of rotting food and I am super happy just to even look at it. 

Right now, I’m about a third of the way through the NYC Compost Project‘s course to become a certified Master Composter and I have yet to get through an entire class without coming dangerously close to bursting into holy-shit-how-the-fuck-did-I-get-here laughter at least once.

I’ll be standing around with my fellow classmates, making a pile of old, wet straw mixed with moldy food scraps and we’re all sticking our hands in up to the elbow into what normal people throw out, nodding thoughtfully and asking things like, “…and that’s supposed to smell like that, right?” — and after the second or third classmate whips out their phone to get a photo of the pile of compost, I just about crack up.

Back at home, a third of my freezer now consists of shopping bags full of food scraps, used paper towels, and the dead leaves off my geraniums — all to be taken to the garden’s compost bins. I’m also trying to find a good place to store some red wiggler worms in my apartment (under the couch? in the closet? under my bed?) so that some of these food scraps can be turned into worm castings (read: worm poop) which I can then use as fertilizer.

AND I GENUINELY LOVE THIS.

Hacking a wrinkled cantaloupe into squelchy chunks with a shovel! Picking up a mass of writhing worms! Without squealing or throwing up!

I don’t know how I got here, but I’ll take it.

One last thing before I go: in somewhat related news, our garden was featured on Grist.org and in The Epoch Times recently. Check it out!