Back in the spring of 2008 I decided to buy a compost bin. I was able to take advantage of the great compost bins sale Hamilton County does two times a year
http://www.hcdoes.org/SWMD/Residents/Yardwaste/ywcompost.html. After waiting a long winter I was finally able to put my wonderful compost rich soil at use.
My idea was, "...what if I could use my food scraps to grow tasty tomatoes, not like the ones that are sold in the stores now. They do not have any taste or smell, full of pesticide, artificially ripened with chemicals and that may be coming from far far away on a airplane.....What a waste of gasoline...".
If you think about it. Your trash needs to be transported to the local garbage landfill and will be there unmodified for 100s of years. In fact in the landfill the garbage is so compressed that there is not enough oxygen to decompose what could naturally decompose in your back yard.
And the garbage hill will keep growing until there will be no more space. At that point they will need to open a new landfill far from the city and they will spend even more gasoline to transport the garbage in the new site. I'm very sensitive to this as in Italy we keep having events where the landfills we imagined for granted were so full that they did not have anywhere to put the trash and they just left the trash in the streets for months (in Naples 2 times and in Palermo 1 time, just google "spazzatura Napoli" or "Emergenza rifiuti Palermo", select images at the top of the page and you will see what I mean). According to a recent study the garbage problem will soon be national in Italy because in 2 years the space of the current landfills on the all territory will be exhausted.
So going back to my compost and tomatoes. I thought it was a great idea to compost. You give more time life to the landfills, you save gasoline to transport garbage and tomatoes and you produce rich compost for your plants and garden.
Since I started to compost and recycling I produce only 1 tall bag of regular garbage a week instead of 3-4 when I arrived in USA, and my family in the meantime is also doubled.
My daughters helped me the all time to collect the scraps, damp them in the bin, turn the material. We also attended a free composting lesson at Park+Vine to learn more about composting.
Spring comes and with it our excitement to finally use the compost. I planted 7 big vases with 7 plants of tomatoes, all different varieties using only my old mulch, my rich compost and some soil of my wooded backyard. Two of those plants came from the seeds of a tomatoe I bought in the store.
My girls are so amazed of the results. What before was food scraps now is rich soil. What was something that mommy use to grab on the shelves of a store, now is growing on a plant in our deck. They go and look at the plants every morning and they tell me how tall the plants are growing and how may tomatoes are on each plant. And they are also all excited that the tomatoes have different shapes and sizes even if all the plants look the same. What an experience for them.
One inconvenient is that so far I was able to taste only a few of the cherry tomatoes, the first to be ripened, in fact as soon as my daughters see a red one they grab and eat it on the spot. I will post you more pictures when the big ones will be ready. The few tomatoes I ate were super delicious and full of flavor, not comparable to the ones you buy at the store.
