Comestibles, compost & a craft

I learned a new word! That word is ¨comestibles.¨ For alliteration purposes, I needed a word for food that begins with the letter C. I could not come up with one on my own; Google came through for me and gave me comestibles. 

Comestibles are the least that I´m going to be writing about here. The comestibles that I´m writing about pertain to food that I´ve gotten from the garden. I know that I talk about my garden a lot; garden produce is such a joy to receive after planting seeds or seedlings (or just receiving if the plants are volunteer...), weeding, watering and waiting. 

I have had (/ almost just had- the season is definitely almost over!) lots of good produce from the garden (mainly from that I didn´t plant but that´s another story...) but I´ve also had some disappointments from two healthy zucchini plants dying at the exact same time, from only getting a few dark green cucumbers (got plenty of light, inedible ones :() and from having one of my bell pepper plants stop producing anything for about two months. Then about a month ago, I noticed that tiny little peppers were growing on it. Awww, tiny peppers are so cute. They lose their utter adorableness as they grow bigger but the best part is that when they´re fully grown they´re edible :). 

Itty bitty baby bells :)

They´re growing up so fast...

Almost comestible...

(¨Comstible¨ can be used as a noun as a synonym for food but also as an adjective as a synonym for edible.)

Not almost comestible... I found these shriveled half grown peppers laying near one of the plants. Who knows how they get there?  I picked them up and took them to their final resting place, the compost bin. 

Well, that´s it about comestibles (mostly!). We´ve been fortunate to have some comestibles from the garden. I will miss taking care of my plant babies and getting produce. We will likely have frost in about two weeks and that will be about it for the garden (I will cover some of the plants the first night of frost but it´s untenable to keep covering every evening that frost is a threat.)

The next C word is compost. I have lots of thoughts on composting- some of which I´ve shared over the years. I do have a ¨fresh¨ er rotten(?) take on something that happened this year pertaining to composting.

But first, in the house that I grew up in, we composted our vegetable and fruit detritus- from the skins/rinds to the pieces of fruits and vegetables that started to rot before we used them and used the compost for our large garden. I don´t remember my parents talking to us about composting (and neither do my siblings). Did we ask why we put items in a separate container to be composted while other trashy things went in the trash can? I don´t know. Maybe we had a conversation or two but they escape my memory if we did. Composting was just a thing that we did- it wasn´t noteworthy, really, or even conversation worthy.

Fast forward to when I was an adult with a job and was able to afford to buy fruits and vegetables regularly (I lived crazy frugally in college and law school; fresh fruit and vegetables did not regularly make the cut when I went grocery shopping). I thought it was so odd to throw away fruit and vegetable scraps. Throwing the scraps out in the regular trash can instead of using them for compost seemed wrong somehow. Why, the scraps would turn into something useful! But, without a garden, there was no use for compost. So I did what most people, at least in suburbia, do- I placed vegetable and fruit scraps into the regular garbage can. No compost for us!! 

When I decided to grow a vegetable garden, I knew that I wanted compost for it. And I knew where that compost would come from: our family´s fruit and vegetable detritus.  I asked for a compost bin for Christmas one year and when I got it, I placed it in the corner of the garden. Then I read up on composting. As I said earlier, I don´t remember ever talking about compost with my parents. So I had no composting knowledge except the most basic facts: that organic material breaks down over time and becomes compost.

I read mostly online articles about composting (I considered buying a book on it but I´m glad that I didn´t. I found plenty of information in articles online.). I won´t go into all of the details here- google composting or GROK it if you want to know more- I found it pretty fascinating :) Basically, you can employ a method referred to as cold composting where you just put all of your scraps in a pile or in a bin. Eventually, you will get composted material. That method can take up to two years, though. A quicker way is to be very much hands-on/intentional with your compost pile or bin and use a method known as hot composting. This requires maintaining the correct balance of green and brown materials, moisture content as well as temperature. You should also mix the compost every so often. I actually tried the hot compost method but pretty quickly abandoned it. If I were running a business via the garden, sure, I´d be fastidious about compost. But I garden just for fun and worrying about compost bin composition to hurry along the decomposition process- no. There are too many other stressors in life. Compost should not be one of them...

Also, my bin came with a lid and I was pretty good about keeping the lid on if just to keep critters out. However, when I decided to rely on cold composting, it made sense to leave it off to let rain and snow moisten the contents (if you were doing hot composting, you´d need to monitor how much moisture the contents had so you´d need to keep the lid on and off). My lid has been off for years and I´ve never seen a critter (which isn´t to say that none have gotten in- I just haven´t seen any).

What Christmas dreams are made of!! Me n' my bin

No, I hadn´t had too much eggnog- I´m slumped over the bin to put it together.

PROMISE I hadn´t had too much eggnog!! This is me being silly and sober! Where I am peaking out is the bottom (obviously...) where the compost would be located. The bin came with a piece that´s not shown here that covers the opening- it can be pushed up and down. With it up, you can easily access the compost.

So there is a point in saying in all of this... this year something happened with my compost bin that´s never happened before. Each fall, I add as many leaves that have fallen to the ground as I can to the bin. I mean, I stuff it as much as I can to overflowing. By the spring, the contents of the bin is still pretty high (of course I add scraps nonstop to it as well so that the bin is continually being added to). This summer, when I had tomato plants growing super high right next to the bin, I needed to put tomato cages around the plants to keep the plant upright. However, the ones closest to the bin, I could not put in a cage because the plants were literally right next to the bin- there was not enough space to place a cage. So, I decided to use a small trellis to help keep the plants upright. I placed the trellis inside the compost bin- it was resting on top of the pile and kind of pushed it in to hold it upright. The material inside the bin was compact enough to hold the trellis up. My plan worked! The trellis held the tomato plants upright :). Odd for sure to use the contents of a compost bin to hold a trellis to prop up tomato plants but hey, it´s nature (granted with a bit of ¨nurture¨) and wild and crazy things can happen in nature (like fifteen or so unplanted tomato plants emerging near the bin and providing hundreds of tomatoes this summer!).

You can kind of see the trellis in the compost bin in this picture. You can for sure see the upright plant in the bin. It´s from a plant that´s outside of the bin but it´s being propped up by the bin.

About a week or so ago, I was placing scraps in the compost bin and I couldn´t help but notice something. The trellis that I placed in the bin to keep the tomato plant upright was considerably lower than it had been. The reason it was lower was because the contents of the bin was lowering. In other words, nature was naturing. The contents of the compost bin were decomposing thus creating more room in the bin thus lowering the contents upon which the trellis sat. The lowering trellis was such a great visual of the nature of nature and the nature of decomposing. I´d seen the contents of the pile lower before but never with an item inside the bin to really mark it. 

That´s it about compost! One more thing- another moral of the story (the first one is nature is going to nature meaning once living things will decompose into a product that will assist with the growth of new plants) is that the habits of parents, whether they are talked about or not, will impact kids! Like I said, composting was just something that we did in our household growing up. I don´t remember any conversations about it. When I was an adult, not doing it seemed so contrary to what I should be doing. Kids definitely notice the quotidian things that parents do...

A craft:

A few years ago, I purchased reusable beeswax food covers at a store in town. The covers mold to the shape of the bowl providing a fairly tight cover. They are perfect to use on ceramic or metal bowls- bowls that typically you´d use plastic wrap or aluminum foil to cover. I noticed that I went through much fewer foil and plastic wrap once I started using the beeswax covers that I bought. I looked up how difficult it would be to make my own covers (I really wanted a larger cover for bigger bowls) and found it was quite easy. You simply melt beeswax over cotton material, allow the wax to cool, and you have a beeswax food cover. I bought some beeswax and used cotton material that I had on hand to make a larger cover.

Abby asked me if we could make some covers for her before she headed to Tenneessee. We never got around to it and I felt badly about that. After she was gone, I bought some cute material from Walmart to use to make some covers for her. When she was home the other weekend, we made some. ¨Made¨ is a bit of an ambitious word... we melted wax over the material and put it in the oven. That´s it! 

Here is the material that we used...

This is one of the beeswax covers that I purchased. I used it for comparison purposes. I wanted to make covers for Abby that were a little bigger than this.

We spread some wax beads over the material and baked for a few minutes.

And now they´re wax covers!

I placed one of them over a bowl so you can kind of see how they cover a bowl.

Linking up with Joanne for Talking about it Tuesdays