KHAKI CAMBELL DUCKS & COMPOST HEAPS IN ENGLAND
(Page 3 of 3)
May/June 1971
By Rod Pidgeon
We have a massive compost heap. Onto it goes just about everything—grass mowings, beading from the stock, weeds, prunings—anything organic which is not diseased. Even shredded paper rots down. I find that grass mowings should be mixed with coarser material if they are to break down easily. Our heap is about four feet wide, and is kept in shape with chicken wire. When it reaches the size of a four foot cube, I start adding to one end until the pile reaches a length of twenty feet. Then I "turn the corner" and make the stack "L" shaped. The top and sides of the front of the heap—as it is turned—go into making the back.
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Nearly everything in our compost pile goes down to a sweet and crumbly humus, except bones. Fur and feathers completely disappear, however, and thick stalks need a good bash with a hammer or they'll take forever to decompose. We mow the weed patches for the heap too. Variety is the thing in composting.
Now something about cooking. Meat is tough when the tissues holding the muscle fibers together are tough. And the older the beast—the coarser the tissues. They can be broken down, however, in two ways: by vinegar, wine, beer and cider or by long, slow cooking. We cook elderly hens by leaving them for 12 hours or so in foil wrapping in a very low oven. To make stews and similar dishes, we use a 'haybox'—simply a box full of hay built to hold a stew pot and preserve it's stove heat. This gives the stew a long, thorough cooking—you don't have to watch it—and it saves on cooking fuel.
We like wine, so we have a glass at each evening meal . . . and beer is always available to cure the thirst caused by honest toil. I'll send you the recipes in due course.
By the way, since I'm already the wrong side of forty—I'm no 'hip young adult'! I keep up with what's happening though—and MOTHER certainly helps.
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