The Compost Bin

My father's grapes need your help. Does anyone know what's wrong with these grapes? I'm thinking it's some kind of disease but all of my searches have come up empty.



I was looking forward to some good wine this year but if all 250 of his vines become affected by this, we'll be out of luck. If any of the Compost Bin readers are grape people, if you could let me know what the deal is, I'd really appreciate it.



Where are those Fruit of the Loom guys when you need them?

People are always walking up to me on the street and asking me compost questions like, "Hey Compostman, what can I put in my compost bin?" or "Compostman, my bin isn't cooking, should I add something to it?" Well... people don't really ask me compost questions offline and no one ever calls me Compostman but a guy can dream, can't he?

Well even if people on the street have no clue that I know about compost, I still get questions here on this blog all the time. So I broke out my video camera and got to work.

Well, I'm back. I was going to take the rest of the summer off from blogging and focus on my career but my career is just too boring. The plan was to read a lot of programming books (I build corporate intranet sites for a living, you know IT stuff), take some training courses and update my certifications and get back into consulting but I that would have been a miserable summer.

I'm still going to update my skillset and look for consulting spots but I'm going to blog about compost while I'm doing it.

So anyway, enough about that and on to something that I actually enjoy talking about, my garden. Well I usually enjoy talking about it but this year's garden is a disaster. I have totally neglected it lately and it shows.

Let's review for a moment, this summer I have neglected both my blog and my garden but that is about to change. In the garden, the first thing I need to do is some weeding but after that I need to spread some compost on my beds. I have a giant bin full and it's just sitting there rotting. That's usually a good thing but it'll be a better thing if it's in my vegetable garden.

And as far as blogging goes, I have lots of ideas for posts and videos and a backlog of pictures, so content shouldn't be a problem. I've also signed up for a course on Podcasting at SparkplugU because I'd like to turn my dopey videos into, well... a dopey podcast.

Part of the homework for the course is to figure out what your audience wants. So I've posted a survey (which should be directly above this post) asking what you'd like to see more of on this blog. I probably lost of bunch of my readers by telling them that I was going on hiatus but if anyone is still out there, please let me know. Anyone, anyone... Bueller?

I'm going to be taking a break from blogging for a while so that I can focus on my career. Unfortunately blogging doesn't pay the bills. If I start back up again it'll probably be sometime in the fall.
Happy Composting!

Update: I'll never make it to the fall. My career is too boring. I think my hiatus is over. :)