If You Want to Smell Death Try Composting

The concept is great, but the reality stinks

S. A. Mulholland

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Photo from iStock

Don’t get lured by adorable images like this.

‘See?’ the dad is likely telling his child. ‘Now, we can use this rich soil to grow vegetables in our tiny city garden. All because we composted those smelly onion skins and rotten banana peels Mommie would just throw in the trash. We’re saving the planet, right here in our backyard!

Well now, isn’t that nice? The little girl seems unconvinced, but what do kids know?

Like any ex-hippie Boomers, my husband and I do our best to be environmentally conscious and live a ‘green’ life.

We’re not exactly living off the land, but we do what we can. We drive a hybrid vehicle, keep the thermostat as low as we can stand, and separate our trash into one bin for waste material and another (the orange one) for recycling.

We paid extra for the orange bin though suspect it’s just a money grab by the HOA and that everything from the orange bin ($$) and the essential dark green bin ($0.00) ends up in the same city dump, but we still do it.

Wondering what else we could do to save the planet, we thought about composting. We have a pathetic garden, usually infested by insects or wiped out by Mother Nature. Below is our…

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