Decay and Renewal

Four months ago, with some trepidation, we started composting on the roof of our apartment. The internet recommends things we can't do, like burying it in the ground, having a large, aerated wooden box, tolerating rats and other vermin, etc. Rather, we're following the "just do it and see what happens" approach, which is actually working ok; we've ended up with 5 paint buckets with no holes, to keep smells in, but left open daily, and stirred up weekly, to keep the putrefaction "aerobic". Food scraps go in the first bucket.  When it gets full, it becomes the second bucket, replaced by an empty one, and so on.

Chain of putrefaction

The main idea is to avoid sending all those organics to landfill. So one of our rubbish outputs has become the compost-bucket-chain input. Yay!

Except that after five buckets' worth, we've got another output.  Compost, which is good. But no garden to put it in...

So my considerate wife, ever attentive to my complaining about the poor supply of limes in Buenos Aires when lemon-lime-and-bitters season rolls around, procured a lime tree and a large wooden crate to plant it in. With the addition of some dirt and two buckets of compost, Lima María arrived:

Lima María, here pictured with her new flatmates, Basil, Rosemary, and Unidentified But Enthusiastic Yuyo

Habemus "garden"!

The months passed, and the buckets filled, and we decided that maybe we could try planting some veggies; if we got to the point of eating them, it would be zero-food-mile produce.  Yes, I know that every household with a veggie garden has been doing this for centuries. But for me personally, this would be an Unprecedented Leap Forward, one which people who know me well may struggle to actually believe.

So my resourceful wife managed more container-procuring, we bought some spinach seeds, and dutifully sowed one neat row with some more dirt and putrefied bucket loads.

Sowing

It was just a matter of time, we thought. So we waited patiently...

...and then waited less patiently...

And just as we we debating what went wrong (old seeds? wrong season? incompetent sowing?) this happened:

Sprouting

I tried to keep my cool, but there was a disproportionate level of elation felt.

Which turned out to be proportionate to the amount of crest that fell the following day, when I found this:

It's a jungle out there

Not visible in this photo is a very small stalk, neatly snipped off where the leaves would have been, presumably by the adept mandible of some industrious ant.  The outdoor ants of Buenos Aires are frighteningly large compared to New Zealand ants, but are generally too busy to be aggressive, never venture indoors, and until this moment I had admired their tireless industriousness.

But now I was starting to share my mother-in-law's indignant disdain for them. Alas!

A few days layer, a few more spinach fronds ventured forth, so I've done my nurturing best to give them a fighting chance in this brutish world:

Greenhouse apartments

(...so I can later eat them myself...)

Meanwhile, a friend suggested maybe starting seedlings off inside, before transferring them to the rooftop planter.  So these started appearing in various locations in our apartment:

...which a couple of weeks later, are looking like this:

More disproportionate elation is swelling inside my urban soul.

Where will it all end?