Composting - what arrant tommyrot it is

There has been some loose talk about us getting a compost bin, specifically, a comment from Worm Farm Woman, to whom we give our food scraps.

She had been marvelling at our little raised herb garden, which actually produced things we could eat before Christmas, and suggested once the nutrients in the potting mix had run out, we might like to keep it luxuriant with our own compost.

Where would we put it, I asked politely.

Beside the herb garden, she said.

What arrant tommyrot this was.

The herb garden sits audaciously at the foot of a gorgeous bluestone wall which greets you as you reach the top of our drive rather like the glowing Emerald City greeted Dorothy at the end of the Yellow Brick Road.

It is a breathtaking sight, which has seen many guests to the house break down in tears at its exquisiteness.

Now, Worm Farm Woman was suggesting we build a huge, fat, rotting, steaming ugly bin of unwanted food and plant excreta.

It would make more aesthetic sense for us to live in a tent at the council dump.

There is of course room for a compost bin up in our secret garden, which is reached after climbing nearly 200 steps.

But would any person living in Dunedin ever consider carrying food scraps up 200 steps in the blizzard blitzkrieg amusingly described by scientists as summer this past month? No, I do not think so.

Compost bins have to be readily accessible, and as Oscar Wilde said, and I'm paraphrasing, it is very hard to be readily accessible and attractive.

But there were other areas of dispute with Worm Farm Woman.

For starters, we were running out of buckets.

She had driven over one of them in her ageing Rover, and while I had gaffer-taped it back together, it leaked prodigiously.

The bucket had become, in worm farm terminology, buggered.

Plus, I had taken to putting things into the bucket that were plainly inappropriate for her little wriggly pets, like an unopened can of spaghetti, which had been given to us by a visiting hippie in 1998 and which we had kept in the cupboard in case Middle beach burst its banks and made us live on the roof.

And at Christmas, I garnished the swill by enclosing a chocolate marshmallow Santa wrapped in coloured tinfoil.

It was, after all, the season of giving.

Worm Farm Woman saw it as the season of attempted murder, and the Santa was mashed back in our letterbox the next morning.

As I have written before, I have neither the attention span nor the energy level to garden.

I have done due diligence on vegetable gardens, and it is clear you can buy vegetables at a fraction of the price at the supermarket.

If those wishing to be, 'ow you say, self-sufficient, are happy putting thousands of wide-eyed innocent school-leavers out of a supermarket job, then that is their moral decision.

Personally, I care for the future of the planet a lot more than that.

I am also concerned with the degree of pride people show in their composts.

Some people I know have been even tipped over the edge of house-buying because of the existing compost heap.

Absurd.

It is significant that real estate ads, which feed on hyperbole, heinous larceny, and some of the most dyslexic grammar seen since Pam Ayres, never mention compost as a property highlight.

I think we can assume if something can't be hyperbolised by a real estate agent, it is unnecessary.

I hope Worm Farm Woman still wants our uneaten food.

If she doesn't, I will have to go back to putting it in the council rubbish bags we put out the night before delivery, and which, before the worm farm era, were regularly ripped apart by feral cats and starving musicians.

There must be a solution, and it can't possibly be compost.