I just returned from my compost pile, where I deposited the stem of a zucchini, the tip of a yam, a red pepper stem, the bottom of two baby bok choys: the remnants of a soup I made today. The soup feeds my wife and me; the scraps feed Mother Earth.
On the way back from the compost, I plucked ripe elderberries from a bush – small and tart, with tiny woody seeds (the dessert for my soup-meal!). Composting gets you out of the house, like walking the dog. Dog owners are thinner than cat lovers, because they have to walk, while cat people must form their legs into laps and sit motionless for hours.
Composting heats the earth. A compost pile has warmth, like a human hand. (Or more like a breast, sometimes with the butt of a carrot on top as a “nipple.”) It’s warm because of bacteria: thermophiles and actinomycetes. We’ve been brainwashed by antibacterial soap manufacturers into believing all tiny organisms are evil. But, in fact, cooperating with bacteria is the key to a happy life. Eat yogurt and kimchi and sauerkraut and miso to improve digestion. Cultivate your “microbiome” – that is, the skin bacteria which moisturize your body and repel harmful insects.
And your kitchen scraps nourish earthworms! Compost tastes great to worms – quite similar to lemon meringue pie. [Note: That’s an educated guess.]
Those of us who are bad poets — recently I wrote:
One Big Egg
can
feed a
family
of nine.
— are proud that our compost piles actually contribute something useful to the world. More and more people are dubious that the plastic in their recycling bins really gets recycled, but you can see compost transform into soil with your own eyes, feel it with your fingers.
One day, my wife was writing an article – she is also a journalist, for this newspaper – about how to discourage bears from breaking into your house, when she heard someone stirring in the kitchen. “Sparrow’s up early,“ she thought, but when she checked, it was not me, but an Ursus americanus: a smallish black bear, maybe a yearling, attempting to open a packet of alfalfa that we kept as rabbit feed.
“Get out!“ Violet shouted, and the bear did. I’m telling this story for a reason. The creature was attracted by fruit in our compost pile. Since that moment, Violet has decreed that no apple cores, banana peels, or eggshells go into the compost while the bears are awake. Once they begin their hibernation – roughly around Thanksgiving – fruit refuse can safely be laid on the pile. All that ends in April, when the bears stretch and yawn again.
Since we’ve adopted this yearly regime, no more bears have stepped through our doorway.
These days we place all our bear-attracting refuse in a plastic bag in the freezer, and bring it to the composting center behind the Shandaken Town Hall, in spring and summer. My urban friends do something similar, carrying frozen compost to a local community garden, or to a bin provided by the city.
My career as a composter began in the spring of 1976, in Gainesville, Florida. I was renting a one-story brick house with two friends, which came with a garden bed. I planted rows of vegetables, and ended up with a crop of two tiny carrots, the size of my thumb, and five tiny kale leaves. But my compost pile was a success, moistened by the nightly thunderstorms of a North Florida summer. And I liked composting better than gardening. It didn’t waste water, and it produced one of the most valuable substances on earth: fertile soil, for someone else to garden with. It is pleasurable to visually increase the size of our planet.
Back in the 1970s, all human knowledge was contained in the local library. I took out a gardening book, and learned the anatomy of a compost pile: one layer of vegetable matter, one layer of grass clippings, one layer of manure. I lived near the stables at the University of Florida, so I’d bicycle to them, shovel horse droppings into a plastic bag, hoist it into my ubiquitous backpack, and bicycle home.
In honor of my 1970s self, I went to the Woodstock Library and found Organic Gardening (Not Just) In the Northeast by Henry Homeyer:
“Compost is not high in nitrogen – perhaps one or two percent – but it has many advantages over chemical fertilizers. First, compost helps to build that light, fluffy, dark-colored soil that we all want. It helps clay soils to drain better, and sandy soils to retain water better. No chemical fertilizer can make that claim.”
My compost pile today is less doctrinaire– mostly just a mound of kitchen scraps, occasionally festooned with dry leaves or grass cuttings.
Of course you can put anything in a compost pile, even a toaster, but not everything decomposes quickly. Veg in One Bed by Huw Richards lists materials that shouldn’t be in compost: 1) fish and meat scraps, which attract rats; 2) excessive citrus peels; 3) teabags, which contain plastic; 4) glossy or coated paper, which leach harmful chemicals into the soil.
I had a disillusioning experience digging through the garden beneath my grandparents‘ porch in Scranton, Pennsylvania, as an adolescent. Numerous peach pits they’d thrown in the soil over the years had become desiccated, mummified. They had neither sprouted nor transformed into humus. That’s the reason my wife and I have a midden. (I am indebted to my friend Petula for this term.) It’s a pile for items that don’t quickly break down. Archaeologists spend much of their lives shifting through middens, where ancient cultures deposited broken pottery, bones of animals, husks of fruit. I picture future archaeologists finding my midden and deducing that 21st-century Americans subsisted on olives, avocados, dates, corn on the cob, and pistachios.
Most of us don’t have the luxury of a midden, but we can all drive to the town hall and contribute to communal soil-building. And, of course, after a lifetime of feeding our compost piles, we ourselves become compost, no matter how thick a coffin we’re buried in.
Join the family! 
