Compost has little about it that is attractive to a cat. It is decomposing garden waste. It is full of worms and woodlice (and ants sometimes), and has bits of rotting vegetable in it. Mmmmmmm....... not.
F makes compost in 3 big black bins. She used to throw all the vegetable matter waste in the compost bin but we have a worm farm now and the worms eat most of the fruit and veg scraps. These days the compost is made out of plants cleared of the garden. They get chopped up in a green machine before going into the bins. The green machine shreds things even more effectively than I can. (I don’t let F put cardboard boxes anywhere near it!)
Newly filled with these shredded plants, the bins get warm. That is about the only thing about compost that might be attractive to a cat – especially a cool cat. However due to a shortcoming in their design, the bin lids are the wrong shape for sleeping on. Someone missed a trick there. If a cat had designed those bins they would have been dual purpose for no extra cost.
F tells me that you can ‘slow cook’ (whatever that means) in a well made compost heap. I’m not interested in cooked or cooking (unless it is freshly roasted pork), and I’ve no intention of being ‘in’ that compost either. I just like the idea of gently warming myself over a heat source that can’t be switched off by over zealous, energy saving, staff. And it’s all going to waste.
Our first ever compost heap at this house had, momentarily, one other major attraction. F had pulled the bin off and was digging the contents into the wheelbarrow one day (I like wheelbarrows too but that is another story). I was supervising from a garden chair some distance away, when suddenly she stabbed her fork into the heap and came over and disturbed me. She made me sit beside the heap before she started digging again. I’m really not that attracted to compost. I really don’t want to supervise that close to….. hang on it’s making a noise. More digging. More noise. More digging, and suddenly the source of the noise broke cover and dashed up the garden.
Crikey (yawn) - it’s getting away. I suppose I’d better show some willing; it’s had a decent head start.
I gave chase as it shot under the holly tree, then out the other side and along the bottom of the brick fence. It took refuge behind some slabs of concrete propped on the wall behind the lilac tree. I studied it through an opening too narrow for me. I reached in and tried to fish it out. It was too far away and I couldn’t reach. F pulled the top of the slabs away from the fence and suddenly my ‘prey’ shot up like a climber up a rock chimney - feet on fence and concrete. She jumped back and let the slabs go just in time to pin the animal by its tail and it sat on top of the slabs, shouting at me while F retreated to the house. Before she came back carrying the handle out of her pick-axe, it had worked its tail free and tried to hide in undergrowth on the other side of the garden. I flushed it twice but she didn’t seem to be hurrying and by the time she arrived it had gone. I wouldn’t tell her where it had gone and she had to shift lots of bags of compost looking for it. She couldn’t find it. (Serves her right for being so slow.) It had climbed the other lilac tree and gone over the fence into the garden with the small yappy dogs. Perhaps it preferred to take its chances over there.
I heard her using the talking box to tell Mr B that there had been a rat in the garden. A rat. So that’s what it was. It was quite pretty actually. It had nice fur.
Now I always closely supervise the digging out of compost heaps, but there has never been another rat. Privately I’m quite relieved about that, but I have to keep up appearances for the humans on my staff.
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