Making dirt: a composter's story
It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to rot. By Kathy
On our second-story apartment deck, I'd grown tomatoes, peppers, and herbs — a virtual forest of dense, sturdy plants clambering outside the railings and drenching the neighbors below with the overflow of their daily waterings. The deck-garden provided a little bit of food for us (and a stealthy snoozing spot for a neighbor's cat who bounded up the deck supports on a regular basis), but when we moved to a house, I was itching to have a decent-sized organic garden. And part of having an organic garden, as I'd learned from all of the magazines and books that I dutifully read, meant compost: Black Gold. Compost Tea. So when we loaded up the truck and moved out to the rental house with our first load of stuff like some latterday Beverly Hillbillies in reverse, one of the first things I did was scout out a spot for the garden and another spot for the compost pile.
"House" might be too charitable a term for this particular dwelling. The place was only about 800-some-odd square feet and it featured such sure-fire real estate "sellers" as rotting trim, maple saplings growing in the gutters, no insulation (none!), four-inch holes that welcomed the field mice, aluminum electrical wiring, a smelly and rapidly failing septic system, and a geriatric furnace that broke every winter, sending the landlord scrambling over to the house (inasmuch as he scrambled) with electric spaceheaters. But such as it was, it was our first venture outside apartment-dwelling and while it wasn't much of a house, it was a home.
Our first composter was a four-sided wire bin
bought at the local feed and grain for about $20. We placed it at the
back of the yard to keep the anticipated smell at bay (the septic system
had not yet failed to the extent that its own aroma overrode any other
olfactory concerns in the yard) and started by tossing in some sticks
and twigs to create a bottom layer with some air circulation built in.
We added vegetable scraps for green matter and leaves and straw for brown
and turned it periodically with an aluminum compost turner. It wasn't
a major hassle, it didn't smell, and I felt very "green" and
satisfied with myself about the whole business.
But the magic didn't happen until the next year
when we decided that the compost was ready to screen and use. Lacking
a compost screen (who buys those, anyway?) I dumped
shovelfuls into a K-Mart milk crate leftover from my freshman dorm days
and shook it out over a wheelbarrow. The milk crate's small holes let
clumps of compost fall through, but kept big sticks, uncomposted corn
cobs, pine cones and the like out of the wheelbarrow. The screened compost
was dark brown and crumbly and smelled like good dirt — earthy,
a little sweet, and reminiscent of the mudpies of everybody's youth.
After we trucked the first few wheelbarrows full of compost up the driveway to the garden bed (I say "we" but I think David did most of the work), I dumped in a bucketful and saw what looked like a worm, but it was too big to be a worm. It was about twelve inches long and as thick as a pencil. It was glossy and brown on top with a pink belly. I later learned that it was a Worm Snake (apparently I wasn't the first one to think, "Hey, that snake looks like a worm!") and have discovered that they are frequent visitors to compost piles, flower beds, and vegetable gardens. Like earthworms, they live primarily underground and aerate the soil that they inhabit. They eat earthworms, grubs, and soft-bodied insects and are rarely seen unless you're digging up their habitat.
When it comes to the natural world and my garden, I like to figure out if things are "good 'uns" (earthworms, ladybugs, wheelbugs, praying mantises, and other beneficials), "bad 'uns" (tomato hornworms, squash bugs, Japanese beetles, cabbage loopers, and, yes, cute fluffy bunnies that damage my plants) or somewhere in between. While they do eat earthworms, worm snakes also eat lots of nasty critters underground and aerate my garden soil, allowing air, water, and nutrients to circulate to the root systems, so I place them in the "good 'uns" category and look forward to seeing them every year when I'm lucky enough to catch a glimpse of one.
Another side benefit of composting I've discovered is volunteer plants. Whenever I spread compost on my garden, I get volunteer tomatoes, squash, melons, and other fruits and veggies hand over fist. I weed most of them out with a light once-over of the garden hoe, but the curious second grader in me always can't resist the temptation to let a few reach maturity, just to see what happens. We've had a couple of good winter squashes mature that way and have had a pumpkin vine that tried to produce pumpkins until our basset hound Toby recognized the shocking similarity between a developing pumpkin and a tennis ball and pulled all of them off the plant. I've seen what ginger looks like "on the hoof" after a rhizome piece sprouted from the compost. And I have a four-foot-high peach tree that will probably never bear fruit but is pretty nonetheless — a reminder of peach canning from years past that sprouted from the pits thrown in the compost. Hybridization has meant that most of the seeds that sprout from compost (unless you grow all open-pollinated varieties) won't grow true to their parents' form, but it can be an interesting experiment regardless.
Now there are those (the Compost Police) who would argue that the presence of snakes and viable seeds and rhizomes in my compost pile are indicators that my pile isn't hot enough. But if the price of a piping hot compost pile is the loss of my worm snake friends and surprise volunteers, it's a price I'll gladly pay. Besides, I don't have time to measure the internal temperature of my pile, carefully balance the brown-to-green ratio, or add lots of starters, activators, and other heater-uppers to it. It's a lot simpler to add brown matter if it gets smelly or slimy (a little lime helps, too), add green matter if it slows way down, and turn it every once I a while when I'm "in the neighborhood" to add a bucket of scraps or water the potatoes or what-have-you. A slow pile still makes great compost — just slower. So you might need to add a second bin so that you have room for all the veggie scraps you're generating in the kitchen while the first pile "cooks" in its own way outside.
Since that first pile, we've bought our own place and have learned a bit more about composting. We've learned that, at least for our household with its rampant vegetable consumption, it works best to have two piles. We've learned that you can compost a lot of stuff — anything that doesn't have fat, dairy, or meat in it goes to the birds or into our pile: vegetable trimmings, apple cores, citrus rinds, Kleenex, paper towels that have been used to wipe up "safe" spills, leftover baked goods, pasta, rice, and the dregs from beer brewing all find their way into the pile. We keep a bale of straw handy for brown matter and I sometimes throw in shredded paper from my office as well. I've also found that it helps me to place some plants that need regular attention, like the potato bins and potted tomatoes, near the pile. Since one or the other of us has to go to the pile every day or two to dump in kitchen scraps and add some brown matter, it means that those plants get walked past on a regular basis. By being near the compost, they are no longer out of sight, out of mind and they get watered and tended more often than they might otherwise.
Our compost gets spread on all garden beds whenever it's ready — dark and crumbly with that earthy aroma and no visible signs of uncomposted scraps. This year, the peas took off and vaulted to the top of the fence just a couple weeks after the compost applications. The tomato vines are thick and sturdy. The broccoli is starting to make florets and the turnip greens are filling out their corner of the bed. The potatoes have grown at an insane pace and the peach tree has leafed out more fully and beautifully than ever before. If seeing the results from compost application doesn't make a believer out of you, nothing will. I just wish I'd had some of this stuff on that apartment deck years ago!
— June 2002
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