Renovation Adventure

I don’t know what is the stranger word combo in the title – machete/compost or compost/fun. I’m actually enjoying my first foray into composting so I’m going to vote for the machete/compost combo.

I suppose I should explain how I got to this lovely little formula. Before Halloween, Hugh bought a pumpkin for us to do the usual Halloween things to. We planned to carve it on Halloween itself. But then on Halloween we (meaning Hugh) started digging around the front corner of the house near where we have permanent standing water in the crawl space. It’s a long story that needs to get added to the list of future posts, but the story ends hours later with us turning off the water supply to the house as daylight was fading. Needless to say, physical exhaustion + no running water for cleanup = uncarved pumpkin.

After a month of the pumpkin sitting in our kitchen, it became clear that my plan for doing something useful with it (like cooking), wasn’t going to happen. So while Hugh did some frivolous concrete work to patch a crack in the foundation (another future post), I took on the critical project of sending the pumpkin to the compost bin.

But you can’t just throw it in whole. Well, you can. But it will take forever to get all composty. The smaller the pieces, the more surface area there is for all of the microbes to do their business, resulting in faster compost creation.

So I set out to find the best way to break down the pumpkin. For some reason, using a kitchen knife never occurred to me. Instead, I thought it would be fun to raid the tools in the garage to see what I could come up with.

I looked for a mallet and couldn’t find one. So I grabbed a hammer. And a pick axe. And a machete! I briefly considered trying out the crowbar, but that just felt a little too Wiseguys to me.

I should have taken photos during the experimentation phase. But being the blogging newbie that I am, I was just having too much fun to think about pictures. What I found was that the hammer & pick axe just didn’t cut it (sorry for the bad pun) – they made holes, but didn’t really break it apart.

The machete was a different story. I had soooooooo much fun whacking away at poor Mr. Pumpkin with this bad boy. Look at what I ended up with.

pumpkin meets machete

As a bonus task, because I needed a lot of leaves to cover all of the carnage (to avoid attracting pests & keeping the compost from stinking up the place), I happily took our leaf blower for a spin to get some “browns” to cover the “greens” (in this case the greens were the orange pumpkin carcass). That’s one way to get me to volunteer to do yard work.

Buried the evidence of the pumpkin masacre

Now I know how Gallagher got his inspiration – composting watermelons!