Indoors/outdoors

Once, when I was newly graduated from high school and looking to kill some time/make some money, I applied for a job as a florist. How hard could it be? I thought naively. The night before my audition I looked up some floral arranging tips on the internet. Piece of cake! I thought arrogantly. When I arrived, I absolutely bombed with a spindly, bendy, awful arrangement.

So, the other day when I changed the water on this bouquet I received as a birthday gift, I decided to try my hand at arranging again. Honestly, it wasn't hard at all. What went wrong all those years ago? Let's just chalk it up to nerves.

Now, getting away from indoor prettiness and into outdoor smelliness...

Today I got a garden bed prepared for planting. First, I attended the municipal compost site, and shoveled a couple bags of nasty, smelly, horrible, yucky, but supposedly healthy black organic material. Only time will tell. It has made my whole front yard smell like the dump; logical, since it sat for a year next to the dump. Also, it was fairly full of non-yard waste, including plastic bottles, bags, rocks, and other goodies. But the garden it goes into was even worse, with ribbons, yarn, twine, candles, cigarette butts (ahem, guests who swore they'd take the butts with them!) and various squirrel trinkets.

I think I may be a compost snob, since my pile, though much too small to amend a reasonably sized garden, smells wonderful, has no lumps, contains friendly bugs rather than dump-flies, and isn't nearly as questionable in terms of diseases and chemicals. The municipal stuff is (hopefully!) good enough for flowers and other ornamentals, but I will not be going back for another haul for my veggie garden.