Honey, could you put out the trash?

The husband has taken up gardening. As with anything he does, it is a thorough and precise operation that quickly becomes an obsession.

Winter, in the world of gardening, is about preparation. The husband is tending to the compost which will be used for gardening in the spring. He can’t just throw dirt, old plants and potato peels in a pile and call it compost. Oh, no. He has to have a special container, where he meticulously layers yard and kitchen waste with straw and other magic compost fillers such as cow manure. Then he will put a glove on his hand and check the temperature inside the compost. Apparently it’s around 50 degrees Celsius in there. Imagine that.

Here in Belgium, garbage handling has always posed a bit of a challenge. The system is based on plastic bags that you buy in the store and put outside your home at a given date. There are 3 different bags: a blue bag for plastic and metal containers, a green bag for organic waste, and a brown bag for everything else. Paper is collected separately, and you are expected to take glass to a “GLASBANK” (a glass collection point) yourself. Once every few months you have the possibility to put out extra large trash, such as broken furniture, but these items must have an orange sticker on them that you can buy in the city store, or they will not be collected. Depending on where you live, the garbage bags are collected every or every other week. In the city, green bags are collected on Friday mornings. In the summer when it’s hot, riding through town on your bike a Friday morning is insufferable. The greatest challenge of all is to figure out where to keep the bags for a week or two, while pending collection. You’d think Belgian houses would contain separate rooms for this but they don’t. Most people seem to keep their trash on their balconies. We have a backyard storage room that I use for the blue & brown bags. And the organic waste I hand to the husband, who will give out little shrieks of joy if he notices anything particularly fertile, such as potato peels.

By Lovain