I don't what it is about soil that allures me. The need to touch and smell its aroma like coffee has become a daily necessity, like having a cup of coffee, or two or three cups of it.
But one has to be diligent to fill this need. Living in a city, especially here in Seoul, access to soil admiration precedes with some effort. I wish sometimes that it was as easy as driving to a secluded tree dense park with an always availability of empty benches to read with peace while the scent of trees and soil whiffs through your nose with so little effort and while being engulfed in its surrounding like a baby being cradled to sleep.
I get that Mother Nature hit from gardening and worm-composting at home. I think this need is innate.
Getting plants at home was mainly for health reasons and for better air quality. We got our first tree, a weeping fig tree named, "mr tree",
5 years ago. He survived being left along outside the house in a hurricane. He's battled a few diseases. He's a tough one, and he's going with us everywhere we go. So my obsession with plants began rapidly. Our windows and sun touched areas had to be covered with a plant. My excuse were for better air quality, but I was finding that it's been a tipping point in paving my passion to "getting back to the land"(more on this on future posts).
I finally am getting my groove on gardening indoors, but composting has been an ongoing experiment. I'm trying to find the non messy stinky way to compost food scraps and I think I may have found a solution!
Ill call this my pot method.
I'm using a regular plant pot and a water dish that captures the water! This allows water to run down and air to breathe for my worms.
I have been flipping and moving my compost box to get the water ratio right. And this task had been putting me off on getting any bigger. Now I can have as many pots like these and no one would know worms and food scrapes were in them! A Perfect disguise.
Now I can compost almost everyday! I have about 70+ earth worms working away, so I think they're doing their job :)
I actually realized to use the water dish for my worm compost just today. I've been using them for the bigger plants at home. It amazes me what a little thinking can do...I could have been doing this years ago! I'm slow learner and it takes a lot of trials to get me set into doing things right.
I don't cover the pots, but cut up a box to roughly make a lid. Newspapers and dried leaves are common toppers, but I don't have them as accessibly.
I'm really excited about getting this right. In Korea, we have to throw food trash separately and it's a chore to get down your apt building every so many days to throw the almost rotting food stuff. But if you are not as lazy as I am, you wouldn't have this problem.
I don't dig in my compost much at all now. I add the food scraps and cover it with some soil that lying around the house (I have a bag of soil almost all the time). I water it just enough so its wet on the top. I cover it with the make shift lid and that's it. And hours later I check on the water gold released from the water dish that collects it. I water it down to my growing family of house plants.
The pink flowering plant is one of my favorite!
Our cats love the canopy of plants and trees that hover above them.
At least Jack appreciates my effort and the whiff of soil is a mere addiction to an Eco-freak like me.
