Robbie: Is that a rutabaga in our backyard?
Cassi:(sheepishly) uh.....yes.
Robbie:How did it get there?
Cassi: uh.....I sort of rolled it out the dog door a few weeks ago.
Robbie pauses for a moment to take this in.
Robbie: Why?
Cassi: Well, that extra one you bought a while back ended up going bad and I felt guilty for wasting it. Since we don't have a compost pile yet, I thought I would roll it out into the snow and it would eventually decompose.
Robbie: Do you know how long it will take a rutabaga that big to decompose, especially in the snow?
Cassi: No.
Robbie: A long time.
Cassi: Well, Janet said she throws her food waste straight into her yard during the winter.
Robbie: But at least Janet has a private backyard - not a backyard with a chainlink fence and only a few feet away from the neighbor's door!
Cassi: Point taken.
This conversation occurred a few weeks ago and every time I think about it now, it makes me giggle. Mainly because it contains the word rutabaga, which is inherently funny. I did eventually remove the offending rutabaga from the yard when the snow melted (along with a huge amount of dog poop of various bright colors and textures, depending on what object Kenya had eaten that day. Our poor, poor neighbors.)
Sure rolling a large vegetable out a dog door seems silly, but in my defense 1) Pregnancy and breastfeeding remove brain cells 2) I'm sleep deprived and 3) Just yesterday I read an article in Sierra Club magazine about a guy who made a compost bin, but it got infested by rats - so he tried vermicomposting (worms) and it got infested with fruit flies. As a last resort, he started packaging food waste in newspapers and putting them in the freezer without telling his wife.
So Robbie...it could be worse.
Funny thing to me is that as Drew and I read this, we weren't sure which one of us would have been you and which would have been Robbie- could have easily gone either way.
ReplyDeleteWe have a ravine behind our house that we were pitching things into...then we started worrying about bears. What's worse- that we throw old food in a big ditch or that we have bears?
Hmmm...bears are not a problem in Ann Arbor (although there are some giant squirrels with bad attitudes that can compare). When it comes to bears, I would err on the side of caution. Unless you have a neighbor you don't like, in which case you can dump your food in the ditch behind their house and see what happens.
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