Skip to main content

From the Composting Pit

As Thomas Friedman dourly notes in Hot, Flat and Crowded, the eco/green movement is less a movement than it is a block party.

Karen and I (Jeannette) drifted into the party a few years ago when we dipped our toes into composting. We went to a Department of Public Works composting workshop at Griffith Park, which was a hilarious presentation with an interesting audience.

Thinking that it was better to give it a try before we sunk a lot of money into an official composter, we purchased two black garbage cans and spare utility knife blades. We cut the bottoms out of the cans and cut triangular holes all around the sides (triangles were the easiest shape to cut).  We dug two holes in her yard utility area and put the open ended cans into the dirt. Voila, a duet of composting.


Composting is challenging when it's fed from from the kitchens of two single women. Karen can walk her compost out the back door. I collect mine in a lovely can with charcoal filters in its lid on my kitchen counter.  

When life is good, I hand Karen a bag of garbage to take home when she comes to visit. When life is chaotic, as it has been lately, I becomes the Queen of Anaerobic Decay, a dark and stinky art.  (Once I froze my compost pail, thinking I could dump it odorlessly. The bull-nosed base held the frozen compost in the pail until it thawed back into an oozy, stinky mass.)

For awhile, the compost pile was going beautifully.  It heated up the way a well-functioning compost pile should.  The bugs multiplied.  It was a wonder to lift the lid every week and see what had changed. 

Then it got recalcitrant.  It cooled down and stalled. Perhaps we didn't feed it on a regular enough schedule.  Perhaps it didn't get enough to eat.  Perhaps the chemistry (aka the brown-to-green matter ratio) got out of balance. Maybe it dried up. Maybe it got too much water.  Maybe we didn't turn it often enough. We added ventilation pipes through the center of the lids into the centers of the piles. That helped -- a little.


Karen says the problem is too many big chunks are being thrown in (by me -- hangs silently in the air).  I say there's no point in having bugs and bacteria in your backyard if they can't manage chunky garbage -- besides, I'm not pulling out the food processor to make bacteria happy enough to jiggle their protoplasm.  Life is hard.  It takes work!!!!

For several weeks last year, we collected coffee grounds from Starbucks and scattered them both over the garden and into the compost bins.  It smelled like a double expresso every time you pushed open the garden gate.  The odor seemed to discourage pests.  It definitely kept the cats from doing their business among the plants.

With planting time coming up, Kate and I recently turned the contents of one compost can into the other until we reached finished compost.  We then hauled the rich, black, odorless compost and scattered it over the portion of the garden we'd cleared for rototilling.  Then we repeated it with the other can.

Seeing the black compost against the yellowish brown clay soil of the garden plot was a joy. It's magic to turn something as worthless as food garbage into something as productive as compost. Huge white grubs tried to wiggle out of the sunlight.  Red worms twisted and danced. A cat crouched on the cinder block wall and eyed us all with skeptical yellow eyes.

Life is good.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hand-Knit Trellis Now Ready for Climbing Foot-Long Beans

Just as the "June" gloom is starting to burn off, I finished my knitted trellis for the garden. It completely surrounds one of our bamboo tripods, with space at the bottom for tending the romaine lettuces growing within the tripod. It's knit out of nylon twine on US 35 needles. While the nylon has no stretch (the way a wool yarn does), the huge gauge has loads of give. The piece was knit flat with ties attached along one edge.  It is tied to the tripod along one leg. One some early samples for a knitted plant trellis, I experimented with lace patterns.  They look lovely, but I realized two things. One, once the plants grow up the trellis any knitting pattern is lost. Secondly, the plants and leaves need space to grow in and out of. I used a pattern for a shawl: k1, yo, k2tog and then repeat. I got lost a number of times: the yarn-overs drifted over other stitches on occasion. As this was a speed project that won't be visible ones the beans grow over it, I didn
Post a Comment
Read more

Know Your Soil For Best Garden Results

I've always taken soil for granted. It was there. You put seeds into it. You put water on it. Plants grow and produce flowers, fruit or vegetables. Gayle Weinstein, author of Xeriscape Handbook; A How-To Guide to Natural, Resource-Wise Gardening , takes a different view: “Soil . . . acts as a highway between life and death, land and atmosphere, plants and animals.” It stores water, air and nutrients and makes it possible for an exchange of elements and chemical reactions to occur, she adds. She describes soil as being animal, vegetable and mineral combined. Here are six tests Gayle recommends for getting to know your soil. Grab a shovel and a quart jar. Dig up two cups of dry soil two-to-six inches deep from the areas you want to test. Gather a glass of water, dish washing detergent and paper towels. A soil pH kit, a meter or litmus paper will be needed for the final test.
Post a Comment
Read more

Determinate vs indeterminate: why does it matter?

When Karen and I planted our 2020 garden, we made the one mistake you never want to make with tomatoes: we didn't check whether the plants we bought were determinant or indeterminate. Our assumption that the cherry tomato plants would be small (small tomatoes means small plant, right?) and the romas would be big, was 180 degrees wrong. The Great Green Goddess of Gardening was on our side, however. Karen has been able to stake up the indeterminate cherry tomatoes -- and the determinate romas have plenty of string fencing to grow on. I've been asked to write more about the differences between indeterminate and determinant tomato plants. Since I clearly needed to review, I'm glad to do so. In simple terms, determinate plants are like bushes or shrubs; indeterminate plants are like trees. Determinate plants are genetically set to grow to a certain size and stop. Indeterminate plants will keep producing stems, leaves and fruit as long as they get enough water, light and warmth.
Post a Comment
Read more