The Fink Farm Dirt

After years of DIY and hand-me-down composters, we've splurged and purchased a rotating composter. The idea was inspired by Tom, an Oklahoma friend who posted a photo of his on Facebook.  When I commented on it, he told me it came from Tractor Supply . I ignorantly said that Tractor Supply outlets were hard to find in urban L.A. He proved me wrong! Now, I had been poking through Amazon's offerings with appalling results. I found one that cost $300 and reviewers reported that it took hours to assemble. Not for me! The Good Ideas Compost Wizard Jr. was about half the cost, easy to bring home and took no more assembly than dropping it into place and cutting the bands holding its two parts together for transportation.  American-made, it has a seven-cubic foot capacity divided into two chambers. With curbside service at the Santa Clarita store, we had a rotating composter in about an hour. An unexpected consequence of the coronavirus pandemic has been that when you ...

This summer, the mottled umbrella-like leaves of an butternut squash plant have popped up on the west end of Fink Farms. It's interesting since we never planted butternut squash. In fact, we have never had butternut squash in the farm. But we have composted butternut squash remains, and we have had other volunteer plants from using compost. (The ever-helpful Google Extension Service offered up an anecdote about a man who scattered his rich homemade compost over his front yard -- and ended up with butternut squashes shading his St. Augustine grass. True? You tell me . . . ) It's hard to keep a compost pile running hot when you're feeding it out of one and a quarter kitchens. (Karen is the one because she just has to take a short walk from her kitchen to the compost pile; I'm the quarter, because composting for me requires collecting decaying veggies, putting it in my car and driving it over to Karen's. For awhile, it got to be such a problem that I was freez...

After a few too many brushes with anerobic decay in my kitchen compost pail, my passion for composting is cooling. I'm quite sure that my carbon footprint for toting a small pail of fresh compost a couple of miles to the Fink Farm compost bin more than exceeds any benefit to be gained from returning green waste to the ground. An alternative currently has me firmly in its grip: kitchen vermiculture. To describe this in simple terms, you take a set of stacked, ventilated trays and add 1,000 red worms (Eisenia foetida), bedding materials, a little water and up to five pounds of food waste a week. The worms digest the waste, creating casting that are rich in nitrogen, phosphates, potash, calcium and magnesium. The castings can be put in the garden. As the worms finish the waste, they crawl up into the next level of the bin.  The lower tray can then be emptied into the garden. The worms can process fruits, vegetables, stale bread, old rice or pasta, coffee grounds and dryer lint....

This may be a form of profiling, but I always had the image of composting vegetable gardners as being of the anti-consumerism, recycle and simplify-simplify-simplify persuasion. But in the space of six weeks, our gardening equipment has expanded in size, type and sophistication. We were given a baby tiller; a big, stacking compost bin; and a chipper. We found a deal on a folding, tough nylon wheel barrow. We bought the industrial pooper scouper to clean up after our dogs and the neighborhood cats who think of our garden as a the Kohler of the earth. Kate macerated 75% of the garden plot, pausing long enough to transplant a volunteer tomato plant. She has the BunnyLuv waste straw carefully piled as mulch. She's been fondling saw blades and looking up at the termite infested branches of a tree leaning over Karen's garage. The longer she looks the more termite and rot infested the tree becomes and the more necessary it is going to be for her to climb up on the roof of the...

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 m...