The Joys of Composting

     This is about something that makes me feel better.  I find myself needing to feel better lately because I'm not yet prepared to run for office, become a climate scientist, open an opioid treatment center, or take down the NRA.  I really love composting.  It's something I can do right now, every day.  It makes me feel good.  Maybe composting makes you feel better too, or could if you did.
     I have been composting for over twenty years and have arrived at what is for me the perfect ratio of labor to return.  There are two piles: the one that I'm adding to, and the one that's been sitting there breaking down for about a year.  Our stainless steel compost bucket makes it's journey from the kitchen out to the younger pile almost every day.  In the spring I process the old pile, start a new one, and stop adding to what is now the new old pile.  Now about that joy...
     Let's start in late July or early August.  It's time to turn the old pile.  I only turn my pile once, maybe twice.  The stuff on the bottom has been sitting there for over a year and has made fair progress on it's journey toward soil.  The stuff on top is dry and recognizable.  Putting that dry stuff on the bottom, and covering it with the more moist stuff from the bottom makes a huge difference, even if you only do it once. People who need to turn their pile more than this are either low on space or high on the volume of inputs, which may be the same thing.
     Now "joy" might not be the word that leaps into your mind in this context, but realize that I have a long history of loving things "biological."  Looking under rocks and logs was one of my top three forms of entertainment as a kid - might still be.  Turning the compost pile is top shelf wildlife viewing.  Commonplace are the legions of isopods (a.k.a. Roly-polies, or pill bugs), millipedes, centipedes, and earthworms.   There are ants who had the misfortune of having a Queen who chose an unstable part of the neighborhood for their home.   I would see more if I wore my glasses.  Once in a while there is something startling.  The cluster of pilot fly larvae was a bit scary and spurred a quick Internet search.  Whether I find something new or not, it's the best part of that day, or week.

     There is also a slow, deep joy that can be illustrated like this:  Let's build a pile of organic waste in our minds, and start with a big block of spent coffee grounds.  It's a cube about four feet on a side.  That's easily the amount of coffee grounds Martha and I have generated since 1997.  Add to that 9,000 banana peels, 8,000 apple cores, and 6,000 orange peels.  Again, I'm being conservative for a family of four.  We cook a lot, so without getting into numbers, add 20 years worth of onion skins, lemon and lime rinds, carrot peels, celery trimmings, potato peels, and all the parts that you don't eat of every other herb, vegetable and fruit that you cook with: winter squash skins and seeds, kale and collard stems, avocado and mango pits and skins, pineapple tops, skins and cores, etc., etc.  Now add to the pile all the things that can get away from you from time to time: the neglected bag of cilantro, the molding citrus, the flaccid jalapeno, the leftover salad - they deserve death with dignity.  Can you hold that growing pile in your mind for a couple more minutes?
     Now add a bunch of paper waste.  We use brown, unbleached paper towels and napkins.  They aren't pretty, but most of the used ones go into the compost bin.  Add 20 years worth of those to the pile - say 30,000 napkins and paper towels.  And since this may be getting tedious, let's wrap things up on the household waste end with a short list of the miscellaneous stuff: tea bags, toothpicks, hair & fingernail trimmings (mine at least), stale pieces of bread, and kitchen floor sweepings.
     That's a pretty big pile.  Let's add some more.  Most of our yard waste goes out to the curb.  The city picks it up and takes it to a good home.  But there's a fair bit of weeding and trimming of bushes, the product of which goes onto the pile.  Then there's the vegetable garden waste: rhubarb leaves, tomato and squash vines, kale and brussel sprout stems, garlic tops, etc.  Almost done.
     We had two rabbits from June of 2010 to the fall of 2017.  Well, one died sooner, so one and a half rabbits.  They poop a lot - they are like really small cows.  Some of that manure went straight into the garden, and the rest went onto the pile, along with all of the straw bedding.  I used to buy at least one bale of straw per year so add seven full-size bales.  Let's put them all around the base of the pile.  (You could argue the rabbit poop and straw doesn't really count, because it never would have gone into the garbage.  Fine, if you insist, take that stuff off your pile.) Done!
     I'd call that a big pile.  Can you still see it?  Now make it disappear.  I made mine disappear, letting it breakdown slowly but completely, over 20 years.  It didn't go to a landfill where it would have been buried, isolated from sufficient oxygen, and turned into methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases.  The only trace of it is some soil that is more fertile.  That feels good.
     My third flavor of composting joy is short, intermittent, and more intense.  It arrives when I process my old pile. When I say "process" I mean sifting the compost before spreading it around.  Picture a 2' x 4' rectangular tray with a frame of 2x4's and a 1/2" mesh bottom.  I lay the sifting tray over the top of my wheelbarrow and shovel the old pile into it in batches.  What goes through the mesh falls into the wheelbarrow and then eventually ends up in the garden or spread around the yard.  What doesn't gets tossed back onto the new pile for another year of breakdown.  So while I'm lazy about the front end, I'm fussy about the back end - I really like to sift my finished compost.  This is, at least for me, kind of the big moment.  Are you sitting down?

     The stuff that goes through the mesh is brown, crumbly and smells like, well, nothing - or just dirt.  I'm always amazed at how little odor it has.  The stuff that's left behind in the tray includes the flotsam and jetsam of a family year - chunks of corncob from the Fourth of July, peach pits from fruit fly season, pumpkin stems from jack-o'-lanterns, pistachio shells from Christmas, avocado pits from the Superbowl.  There's a steak bone from Dad's AGR dinner.  And look, there's a mango seed that sprouted but was overwhelmed by a climate it was never meant to face.  It's a moment when I can hold all of the past year in my mind at the same time.

I toss the flotsam and jetsam onto the new pile and wave a little goodbye as they continue their journey toward soil...

Baby, breakdown
Go ahead and give it to me
Breakdown, honey take me through the night
Breakdown, now I'm standing here, can't you see
Breakdown, it's alright
It's alright
It's alright

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

     The finished compost becomes some of the DNA of our small piece of land, this place that I now feel a little more anchored to, in space... and time.