Tuesday, July 10, 2001
Composting
Ah, Summer. The bean and squash seedlings have long-since lifted their bowed heads, and the sugar peas have climbed their string ladders and popped out their perfect, crisp pods. Gardens everywhere are singing out “Life!” My own preoccupation this summer, however, is with the opposite end of the cycle – decay. To be more specific – composting. I am currently obsessed with composting.
Composting, for the uninitiated, is the process of collecting bits of garden debris, kitchen peelings and other organic material in outdoor piles, and turning the mess occasionally, so that everything decomposes into nutrient rich soil with which to “feed” a garden. My composting friends are eager to testify: “See this hill?” Sally says, “Nothing would grow here until we added our compost!” “It’s magic dirt,” her husband intones with mock seriousness, waving his hand at the lush lilies, lamb’s ear and Sweet Woodruff now crowding the once bare slope. “Composting” is the natural life cycle of production from decay. Poets rhapsodize about this “circle of life”; Walt Whitman, poet of the Civil War, ennobled the tragic ashes of dead soldiers by envisioning the life they would nourish—those ashes, as he says, “fructify all with the last chemistry.”
I love Whitman’s bittersweet description of composting as “the last chemistry.” It’s natural, inevitable. There’s probably a bumper sticker out there: “Compost happens.” And yet commodity culture has stepped in to hustle the whole process along and make some big bucks in the process. As a novice composter, I nervously took it all in..
First there’s the matter of the composting bin. My husband and I scoured gardening books for models we could build – some made of friendly chicken wire and slats; some sterner ones of cement blocks with air spaces between. There was even a charming log cabin model, and its ugly urban cousin, made of an old 55- gallon drum punched through with holes.
However, in our small suburban yard, we’re composting within sight of the sidewalk, so we reluctantly settled on a pricey pre-fabricated model—the “Flo-tron Modular Composting Bin with Mixing Tool”—a set-up that might amuse gardeners with spacious plots, who can keep open piles of compost “cooking” along the edges of their gardens, turning them occasionally with an old pitchfork. ("Cooking," by the way, is how true composters describe what happens at the 160 degree hot spot in the center of a lively compost heap.)
Then there are all the decisions to make about one’s composting practices. For example, should you add worms to speed things along? In our case, yes, two little Styrofoam boxes of them from the bait shop. Like the witches in “MacBeth” we dropped the two roiling balls of worms into the compost cauldron, hoping to brew up something dark out of rotting vegetable matter.
But even the simple cardinal rule of composting – “Use only vegetable matter” – is distressingly unclear in some cases. Coffee grounds? Yes. Coffee filters? Maybe. “One friend says, “Hey - it’s just wood pulp!” but another one warns ominously, “You know the toxic bleach they put in those things?") Peelings of potatoes, cucumbers, rinds of any kind – yes, of course, yes. Egg shells? Yes, even though they come from animals (go figure). Olive pits? ( I am interpreting my recent dream about a glorious olive tree rising from our Flo-Tron Modular Bin as a Divine Yes.) Leaves and small sticks, yes. But what about my daughters’ popsicle sticks? Probably not, not even to inspire the worms with the fading messages stamped on the Galactic Pop’s sticks: “There’s no time to lose, Space Rangers!” and “To infinity and beyond!”
If I stir our moldering casserole of rinds, broken eggshells, strawberry stems and cucumber peelings a bit too often these days, if I open the lid just to admire the decaying mosaic and catch a whiff of rich, promising air, it’s because I’m still in awe of this process of making new life from death and decay. A repressed character in a Barbara Kingsolver novel I’ve just finished reading chastises a neighbor for her compost piles; “Laziness lots” he calls them, and “stacks of sloth.” But in the end, everyone in the novel remembers that death begets life. Today’s rotten rinds are tomorrow’s roses. My current obsession with the “last chemistry” of decay is an obsession with growth, with buds, and flowers, and fruit. With summer itself.