One of my biggest challenges in the garden has been convincing local kids (there are some adults who could use convincing, but I’ve given up on them) that worms aren’t gross at all. Somehow it worked, we’ve got a garden full of six year olds wetting their hands and very, very carefully conveying worms to the compost.
Score one for the animal kingdom.
So this weekend, someone found a bird’s egg lying under the Paulownia tree. I set it on a stone in my plot without a particular plan in mind, and it was found and accidently crushed by an 8 year old who ran home hysterically upset. In my effort to convince her that I wasn’t angry (I don’t really know how to deal with the bigger question which is why she was so sure I’d beat her for picking up an unidentified blue thing that turned out to be fragile.) I asked her about what had been inside the shell and we pulled the shell out of the compost where she’d hidden it.
Somehow, that exchange prompted her younger brother to look for more egg shells, and since the compost crew was in the process of layering the food waste bins into the yard waste, there were lots and lots of more egg shells right in front of us, most of them buried in someone’s two week old kitchen compost, which he didn’t seem to mind the smell of at all.
My new challenge in the garden is figuring out how to encourage some inquisitiveness without ending up with a whole flock of children gleefully picking through half rotten compost looking for salmonella.