These soldier fly larvae are the busiest decomposer in our compost bin. They reduce our organic wastes pretty quickly.

The bin has a very balanced microecosystem. There are no flies, no smell, and plenty of helpful insects. If the bin starts to smell (this has happened once or twice in 3 years and was very mild) we add shredded postal mail wastes to bring balance to the carbon to nitrogen ratio. The bin should never smell like rotting food. It should smell just like dirt.

This bin diverts all of our kitchen wastes (except meats, citrus and oils) and some of our postal mail wastes from our sewage system and local landfill (Middle Point - Rutherford County) and puts it back into use for our vegetable gardening and landscaping.

Here’s an interesting blog dedicated to these bugs if you want to learn more.

Tennesseans continue to defy reported national trends showing people driving less due to gas prices. According to July state tax revenue reports issued today, Tennesseans consumed 11.35% more gas in May than in April of this year and 7.85% more gas in May 2008 than in May 2007. The one month increase amounts to 26,675,570 more gallons of gas purchased.

State gas taxes are $0.214 per gallon. April gas taxes collected in Tennessee came to $50,285,000. That’s 234,976,635 gallons of gas purchased in April 2008 in Tennessee. May gas taxes collected came to $55,994,000 or 261,654,205 gallons of gas purchased.

It’s important to note that the monthly state tax revenue reports are for taxes collected the month prior to the report on money spent by the consumer the month before that. If I bought gas in April, businesses paid the state taxes in May, and they were reported to the public in June.

Here is the June report (xls) and the July report (xls).

The garden is slowly starting to churn out vegetables. These three huge tomatoes were nice to come home to. As I write this, Vince is walking one of them over to his mother’s house a few houses down.

If it looks like we’re going to have more tomatoes than we can eat I’m sure we’ll share them, but I sure would like to find a way to preserve them to take a taste of the garden into the winter.

The garden is doing really well this year. This is the first year we tilled in some of our compost from the previous two years. The compost had reduced to a dark, black soil loaded with earth worms. This fall, we should have a lot more to take out of the compost bin and till into the garden plot.

Please tell me you reacted the same way I did when you read that title. I had never heard of frying pickles until I told some co-workers that I made pickles for the first time last weekend. Apparently fried pickles are great, but not this kind of fried pickle.

This morning I forgot that I didn’t write the date they were made on the jar, so I’m popping the pickle jar photo into a post here so I can remember when they were made. From what I read, you have to wait about 2 months before they are ready to eat. They keep for 2 years.

You can see the recipe I created from a couple of different recipes here. I added pepper corns and jalapeno seeds to spice it up a bit. These pickles were made from our first batch of cucumbers. Last year, we had a few we just didn’t eat because they came in all at once. This year I’m going to try pickling and see how that goes.