Eating our compost.

We have a little bin in our home, as most Australian's I assume, would have this little bin in their homes: for compost. This bin, shallow as it is, fills up quickly and this fresh trash goes into a bigger bin that's just outside our back door. I am more lazy about emptying this one into an even bigger bin, which is the actual garden compost bin itself.
The bin that lies just outside our back door is removed, not necessarily when it's full, but when I can't take the smell any longer. That's a particular brand of laziness I like to call 'painziness'.
However, when it does get emptied, the ritual dictates that I pick up this now 40kg block of smelly sludge and cart it 100 metres to the garden and empty its sloppy contents into the large compost bin. Carting it back is no bowl of cherries either because what smell it did have before has now amplified because it is, for all intents and purposes a shit salad which has just been tossed with two corroding strips of roadkill acting as salad forks.
It's smelly, is what Im trying to say. Anyway, it compels me to take the next step which, as you would have guessed, is to run it under the tap, semi fill it up, semi swirl it around and dump it onto the closest patch of dirt which is just to the side of our verandah.
Enter the Jap pumpkins and the tomato plant. What must have happened, somewhere along the line, is I must have composted a tomato and a pumpkin, they must have had viable seed sitting at the bottom of the compost and when I washed them out and thrown them onto the garden, they must have just grown from all the favourable conditions. Brilliant.
Keep in mind, these are some of the healthiest plants Ive grown in a while. The Tomatoes were beautiful. We picked 10 huge green tomatoes and 4 plump red tomatoes. With the green tomatoes, we made a delicious pickled tomato relish that I added to some toast, hommus, and smoked salmon. It was lovely. And it was encouraging to know that unripe tomatoes have such a great use. Clare also made fried green tomatoes with some other green tomatoes that were late season in our actual garden.
The next thing we did is raise a jap pumpkin amidst the hebe. We love this Jap pumpkin because I've just come off a summer which produced 32 Queensland Blues so youd think that I'd be over pumpkins. However, Jap pumpkins have an easier use because the flesh is sweeter, the skin is more tender and it is much more suitable to use in roasted vegetable salads and pizzas, which is exactly what we did.

Here is a video of our May panning view of our vege patch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRpgLwcYf00