Fertile Grounds

Mike and I have been proud owners of a vermicompost bin for several years now. It's one of my favorite things that we own, and the thousands of worms that live inside it, faithfully eating our organic garbage, are among my favorite pets. (Honestly it's a tie between them and our rabbit, Science.)

Our vermicompost bin, post-harvest.
(Hence it only has 2 trays, instead of 5)

I have to admit, though, that sometimes I go a little too long in between compost harvests.  We have the stacking kind of compost bin, which is infinitely easier to handle than the single bucket/bin that we started out with. (I'll have to tell that story another day).

All that's involved in harvesting the finished compost product from our current bin is taking out the bottom tray from the stack, emptying the contents into a potted plant or the dirt pile I keep in our driveway, and then replacing the now-empty bin on top of the stack.

But as with all things in life, (dishes, email, and emptying the trash...) the longer you wait to do it, the more difficult the task becomes. And in the winter, I tend to find any excuse not to harvest our compost bin. This time around, my six-month-long exercise in exquisite procrastination has led to having three bottom trays ready to be emptied instead of just one, plus a whole lotta life growing throughout the system.

Upon separating all the trays, I discovered that we were accidentally growing:

• 2 celery stocks from cut celery bottoms
• 5 avocado trees
• A date tree (!!)
• A purple sweet potato (!!!)
• A zombie houseplant that I had deemed dead five months ago, but which has been growing from the root system that I intended to compost. 
• Finally, a whole lot of pepper sprouts, including some that were most adorably growing inside of egg shells. 

Pepper Sprouts

It's normal to have some sprouting seeds in the compost bin at all times, but this was the first time that we had some full-fledged PLANTS growing, with leaves and branches and roots with dozens of off-shoots. So today I harvested three trays worth of compost material, and four pots worth of plants that are now growing happily in our living room.

Of course, I didn't think to photograph any of this until after I was done planting everything into pots (thus covering them up with soil) so I don't have much photographic evidence of the awesome fruits of our compost bin's labor, but once things start sprouting reaching sunlight from their pots I'll report back.

Celery