Composting, Or Why We No Longer Have an Open Pit in Our Back Yard

Today Chris and I spent about 3 hours in the backyard doing Spring cleanup.  We have had a compost pile since we arrived in Bellefonte, but have not managed to organize it very well.  Basically, there was an abandoned kids' sandbox, so we filled it with compostables.  And it worked fairly well.  But there are a lot of reasons specific to our situation that the open-pit compost  pile just wasn't working for us any more.

1. Bellefonte (the whole region, actually) has skunks.  And we have an enclosed yard, but it's still not really ideal to taunt smelly animals with delicious, smelly food.

2. Speaking of which, our dogs had begun to treat the compost pile like their personal buffet.  

So today we bought this contraption and spent 3 hours building and siting it while also conducting a bonfire in the old compost pile consisting of scrap and fallen wood, woodbine from the hops vine that was all over our fence last summer, and miscellaneous woodlike junk that will compost a lot faster in ash form than regular form.  During that process we cleaned up absolutely every type of junk lurking in our yard (which was quite a bit after a long winter with three dogs doing as they please out there), inventoried the plants and pruned a few back, and discussed our gardening plans for this year.  

So, here's to a great season of gardening -- it feels good to get started.