(Sunday Paper, Year V, Issue 33)

If you know me you know I like keeping my garbage in proper order.

Framingham has a great garbage collection - we have a city-provided bin for our garbage, and a separate city-provided bin for recycling.

The pick-up in our neighborhood is on Monday morning.

I wrote a Wednesday post recently singing the praises of the dump - there’s also a spot where I can drop off our yard waste.

But what the city doesn’t do is collect composting.

So Kathy and I took matters into our own hands.

I’d love to tell you that I know enough about composting that we started our own pile in the yard.

But 1) that is not true, so I can’t tell you that, and 2) I would not be confident enough to do that in a way that wouldn’t attract every wild animal in the neighborhood into our backyard. (Also, as shown in the picture to the right, composting can sometimes become an awfully smelly endeavor, and I’m not sure how I would handle my own pile.)

What we did do, I am happy to report, is sign up for a company that collects composting in Framingham.

The company has been collecting here for about a year, I think…and if it’s much longer than that, then let me amend that statement to say we’ve only known about it for about a year.

We meant to enroll in the program much sooner than this, but this is how it goes sometimes. We act quick on certain things - like booking a trip to Europe. For something like composting, I guess we dragged our feet a bit.

Fun fact: If 400 households in Framingham sign up for this service the monthly fee decreases. We were number 133 or something like that. So perhaps we’re not the only ones who were dragging their feet. (If you’re local and you’re interested and you need the information so you can get us closer to 400, we’ll be happy to provide it.)

So now we take a different approach to our garbage. And, as I already mentioned but don’t mind mentioning again, there are few things I like better than having an organized approach to our garbage collection.

I think what I’m most amazed about is how much is acceptable to be composted. Not only is waste from almost everything we eat, but also many of the paper goods that go along with our meals. (For example, I knew coffee filters were OK…I did not realize we could compost napkins and paper towel holders, to name a couple of items.)

We’re still working on the best way to do this - we bought a smaller garbage pail last week to line with the compostable plastic bag, but I’m already second-guessing whether it’s a good pail. And the small bin in the pictures above is what we put at the curb, but I’m still trying to figure out when to transfer from indoor pail to outdoor bin and where to keep it before it goes to the curb. (If anyone local who also has the composting service wants to weigh in and share success - or failure - stories, I’d love to hear them. Feel free to share in the comments or text me or something. I need a good strategy.)

I’m confident we’ll figure out a good system. We’re still in the early stages right now. We picked up our bin last Sunday, and the first pick-up was on Friday. So we haven’t even had a full week of it all yet.

So far really the only piece of bad news about our composting experience is the fact that I wasn’t home on Friday when the truck came by to pick it up. (But Kathy told me it wasn’t as exciting as the regular garbage truck.)

Notes

*The reason I wasn’t available to watch the compost pick-up on Friday was the girls and I took a day trip to New York and had a socially distant visit with the family. This comes a week after my parents were up here for a day’s visit. We stayed outdoors, it all seemed to work well. We’ll see. Hopefully we won’t have to have these kinds of visits exclusively for much longer.

*On Wednesday I wrote a little about the garden in my “Every Week On Wednesday” post. You can go back and read it on the Facebook Page, and if you don’t already Like that page, you can do that here. Also, you can follow me on Twitter here if you don’t do that already. Thanks for the support!

*Speaking of the garden, after talking with the master gardener who is my brother-in-law on Friday, I got some advice about how to help the plants, which are looking a little sorry in certain respects. I decided I needed to prop the plants up a bit more so that the tomatoes were lifted off the ground on the branches that they weigh down. So we got some extra stakes and some twine and I tied the plants a little higher on Saturday and hopefully that will lead to healthier tomatoes.

*I hope it doesn’t depress anyone that I’ve been counting the weeks in the titles of these quarantine Sunday Papers. I didn’t plan on doing that, necessarily…but I’m also not planning on stopping it.