Dr. Mooks and I went for lunch last week and talked compost.  Since Dr. Mooks is a psychiatrist (not my personal psychiatrist, thank you) she doesn’t really mind that I am moderately obsessed about gardening and compost. I am a generalist gardener, and plant lots of different types of things and hope that something grows. Dr. Mooks is more of a specialist gardener; over the years she has focused her attention on one or two things at a time and then has done them exceptionally well.  For example, when the Mooks lived above us in Toronto, they had phenomenal planters and we would occasionally wonder if the weight of all those 10,000 cherry tomatoes growing on their deck would one day eventually cause our ceiling to cave in. (Actually, I recall that our land lady shared a similar concern).

Anyway, one of Dr. Mooks’s specialties is worm composting. She said that worms have a crop (similar to what birds have) and so they need some kind of gravel/particulate matter in order to digest their food. She uses eggshells and grinds hers with the coffee grinder so that the worms will consume them to help  digest their food. I was telling her about how I don’t like to put any kind of eggshells into the compost because I saved them to sprinkle around as slug deterrent.  I didn’t tell her the real reason…the thing I hate more than anything half egg-shells get thrown in the compost, because when you dig it up a year later, the shell is always filled with a huge knot of worms!  UGHHHHHHHH. The only thing you can do is throw it back into the bin and hope that by the next year the eggshell has fallen apart.

Okay. Gotta go and sort out my new seed packets by planting date.