dead vegetables

One of this summer's resolutions-fulfilled has been buying a composter - and also a sweet little metal miniature garbage can, with a filter-protected lid, to sit on the counter top by the sink. So we dutifully recycle every last flower stalk and rotten pear and, yes, leaf of wilting kale. Then we rotate the compost maker. Apparently we need to add lots of brown stuff (i.e. what? dismantled Amazon boxes? - coffee grounds, which look brown enough, are actually "green," since they emit nitrogen). To be honest, when I added and spun today, all that seemed to be happening was that we've bred a lot of fruit flies. We need, at some point, to buy some Red Worms, which are bred, precisely for the purpose of efficient composting, somewhere in Eldorado. Watch this space. I fed the last of the mealybug worms to the mockingbirds today - a treat - because the life cycle had progressed somewhat, and four or five of the little grubs had transubstantiated into, unsurprisingly, some rather angry mealybugs.

How to fit this in to Jude? I guess when Jude rented the lonely roadside cottage, so that he could have the profits of the vegetable garden, and Arabella could keep her pig, that the pig must have fattened up on something - probably elderly, unsalable, inedible kale.