After a long time, at least six months, I dug through the compost and the fragments of shells and every original piece looked the same regardless of the size, like it hadn’t broken down at all. I even found some orange peels that hadn’t fully broken down, which really surprised, so I started using a food processor to really grind the eggshells into powder first, but that powder is really fine, and it floats everywhere when you take off the lid and then after I mixed in the eggshell powder, that was when I got the fungal infection in the soil, and I was just like okay, and started looking up other methods and then found that talk, just went full leaf. It just seems like it takes a really long time for most trash to break down. Like some fruit peels apparently need half a year or multiple years to break down, which is crazy to me.

And I’ll say I lived in Hawaii at the time, which obviously is incredibly humid and damp all the time, and these eggshells and orange peels were there all year. I could feel the heat of the compost pile, so matter was decomposing, but there are just a lot of food materials that don’t break down as fast as I assumed they would at the time.

Like banana peels! I don’t think I ever saw a banana peel break down. They were just there every time I looked through the pile, arrogantly enduring next to the egg shells and the orange peels.