The Story of a Dollar: Or How Hana Learns to be Smarter with her Money

"A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; 

only the delight of its users did that. Only the use made it mean something."

Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign, 1999

It's an embarrassing tale. Last fall, Walmart had a sale, a buck a bag for compost. I try and avoid Walmart, but the deal sounded so good!  Of course, after I bought five bags and brought them home, I found that the compost was clay with a few roots and moss thrown in. It looked much like the dense, non-draining black clay of my yard, in fact. I managed to find uses for it nonetheless, but I still had a bag left this spring. A bag of  finely ground up rocks.

"Compost" Riiiight...

I was in the Dollar Store (another place I try to avoid, but I go sometimes with G), and I realized that a wire trash bin ($1) would make a great compost sifter.

Easiest DIY compost sifter ever!

 I don't have enough compost to make a hot pile, so my compost takes it's sweet time going from kitchen scraps to dirt. The brown chunks in the wheel barrow (above) are a year old and mostly still recognizable as former food and leaves, but there's some fluffy black gold in there.

Fluffy black gold, also known as mostly finished compost.

Left: a dollar's worth of "compost"    Right: a dollar's worth of homemade compost

 Twenty minutes later, I had an equal amounts of clay and compost (above) and mixed them together (below).

Compost and clay mix

I planted some Viking and Yukon Gold potatoes, watered thoroughly, and mulched it with some pulverized straw (the car is too small to fit the cheaper straw bales, so next time I'm bringing a truck!).

Now comes the hard part: waiting for the dang things to sprout!