It’s the Easter holiday here in Scotland, and the weather has finally turned Spring like (although there is still ski-ing in the Highlands). This is a wonderful time of year, with the fields and gardens starting to come to life at the same time as Christians are celebrating the return to life of Jesus Christ. In keeping with the spirit of the season, I’ve been out in the garden, sorting out the compost bins ready for the first lawn cuttings of the year.

Composting is a truly amazing exercise. We have three bins at the bottom of the garden – a ‘green Johanna‘ for kitchen waste, and then a couple of ‘beehive’ bins for garden waste, lawn mowings, etc. The beehive bins are a traditional design, which even an idiot with a Black and Decker like me can make in an afternoon. The one on the right is last year’s, which will gradually convert to compost. At the same time we’ll fill up the one on the left. As the one on the right shrinks and the one on the left grows we can move the wooden layers across accordingly.

Green Johanna is a great little Swedish girl (even though she wasn’t part of Abba – she takes all the smelly stuff from the kitchen. Her insides look pretty disgusting most of the time. As it’s a sealed unit, it means the contents are safe from rats, foxes, etc., and the worms inside can be left in peace to work their magic. At the moment she’s still got her winter coat on – an insulating sleeve that comes off in the summer.

And the magic of the whole process is this. You put in a whole lot of rubbish, and at the other end of the process you get beautiful fertile compost (picture on the right), ready to grow another year’s flowers, vegetables, etc. You don’t need any added chemicals, machinery, or artificial nonsense. It just happens, year after year, and it’s truly amazing.

So, feeling suitably invigorated after all this fresh air, it’s back to the laptop to blog, to argue against the forces of reaction for a new OpenOffice.org marketing initiative, to proof read a piece on WordPress that O’Reilly are publishing next week, and then decide where to go for a day out in the Ochils tomorrow. Then after dinner off to church for the Easter Vigil service – fire, water, and candle-light – always a moving experience. Not a bad way to spend an Easter holiday weekend.

Happy Easter!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 15th, 2006 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Greenery, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.