Thursday, April 19, 2012

Back to the Land, April 2012

Last weekend, we had a blissful interval of sunshine, and I made the first attempt of the year to bring some sort of order and intentionality to the yard, which has suffered a ferocious neglect in recent years.  The area that looked worst, or which caught my eye first, was the patch right around Mrs.5000's wrought-rebar garden scuplture.


Hoo boy.  A lot of the work was just weeding and grass-pulling to discover the actual garden plants beneath.  I filled a standard garbage can four times with weeds and grass.  After that, there was some modest splitting of primroses -- I am confident enough in my masculinity to state proudly, right here, right now, that I am a big primrose fan -- and the tranplantation of a boxwood shrub from a container into an empty space that used to have an azalea in it, back before the years of neglect.  Then there was some mulching and the reemergence of the bricks that mark the official border (if not always the actual border) between garden and grass.  And I mowed the damn lawn.


So, that's not going to get us into Sunset magazine, but at least it looks like we're trying.

Doing the yard work always involves trips to the compost heaps, and as I was gathering up some relatively good looking dark new soil, I heard an unexpected scrunching sound.  And that scrunching sound took me all the way back to January 21, 2010, when I wrote the following:

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Mrs.5000 received some Australian footwear for Christmas. This was part of the packaging.




"This bag will decompose within 3 months of disposal," it says.





Well, I've been hurt before. I'm putting this into the CompostHeap5000, and we'll see what happens. I'll let you know.


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Here's what the bag looks like within 27 months of disposal:


"Decomposed"!

7 comments:

Jenners said...

Yikers!! That is a lot of work. And I continue to be dismayed by the lies packagers tell. I shall never buy UGG boots.

Michael5000 said...

I hope your decision to never buy UGG boots isn't based on their packaging supplier having oversold them on the compostability of their box liner. It's an awfully minor point.

On the other hand, it continues to irk me that plastics manufacturers refer to industrially compostable products as "compostable." Because they aren't. They are "industrially compostable." It's an "important semantic difference," which is to say a "lie."

Rebel said...

To be fair, there does seem to be a hole in the packaging which does suggest some decomposition of some sort. How's that cup doing btw? Have you thrown it out yet? At this point, I would recommend you avoid putting any more "biodegradable" plastics in your compost heap. Stick with banana peels & egg shells.

gl. said...

i wouldn't mind so much if we could actually put these plastics in our portland compost bin.

Michael5000 said...

The hole is almost certainly where it got hit by the compost turner at some point.

gl.: You mean those little brown lunchboxes? Are those -- hmm, what's the word -- defensible? I think I pretty much laughed out loud and threw ours away, or maybe it's down in the basement.

gl. said...

well, maybe i meant the yard debris bin. either way, we have to throw them away. so painful!

UnwiseOwl said...

The main reason that we don't buy UGG boots is their appropriation of the traditional name "UGG" as a trademark by an American company, Deckers.
We all have to manufacture/buy "UGH" boots now...