“We are all candidates for composting. So we cannot approach the compost heap without a feeling of connection.”—Stanley Kunitz
Composting is the ultimate process of home recycling. No trips to the recycling center are required, just a walk to the compost pile with a bucket of vegetable scraps or a wheelbarrow full of leaves and weeds. An addition of some sort of fresh manure, especially chicken, always helps to heat up the pile and accelerate decomposition. If bears are nearby, vegetable scraps should be covered with dirt to hide the smell.
The production of compost is a way to use limited resources to increase food production. Today, composting is a way to participate in a natural form of recycling at a time when humans are inundating the planet with waste. We are strange creatures who put organic matter into plastic bags to take to the dump, and then buy more plastic bags filled with compost at the garden center. Recycling organic waste at home is environmentally friendly and can be much more efficient and cost effective.
For many years I drove an elderly friend to lunch every week. She was in possession of a scatological sense of humor, and one day we were stopped behind a horse trailer with a bumper sticker that proclaimed “manure happens.” It is true that manure happens, and when it is added to other organic matter, compost happens. “Humus” is synonymous with compost. In 1943, Bertha Damon expounded on decomposition in A Sense of Humus: “To consider humus is to get a hint of the oneness of the universe….During the long history of this planet, weather has disintegrated rock….Countless generations of short-lived weeds have waxed fat for a summer, giant forests have flourished for an aeon, and all in turn have died and given back to the earth more goodness than they have taken from it. All have been composted into humus. And the life of insects and of animals and of men which was sustained upon the life of those plants and upon the life of other animals, all these creatures too have enriched the surface of the earth with their excreta and finally with their bodies. All in turn have been composted into humus.”
Composting can be managed on a strictly scientific level, turning the pile weekly to add oxygen and raise the temperature to kill weed seeds and any pathogens. I find that turning the compost heap every few months is sufficient. Layering the vegetative materials with fresh manure heats up the pile well, and I appreciate the seeds of poppies and forget-me-nots that survive and appear in unexpected places in the garden.
Some gardeners are very possessive of their composted soil. I’ve known some who will share their plants but not the soil on the roots. The French art critic, Octave Mirbeau, enthused, “I find a clod of earth admirable and can contemplate it for hours on end. And compost! I love compost….I spread it and see in the steaming pile the beautiful forms and gorgeous colors that will emerge from it.” Good compost is a gardener’s black gold. Whether used while planting or as a top dressing as mulch, it is a valuable amendment to the soil. A few shovels of compost can be added into holes when planting trees or shrubs. A few handfuls of compost under perennials or vegetable plants will provide needed nourishment and encourage growth.
“The garden instructs us in a principle of life and death and renewal. In its rhythms, it offers the closest analogue to the concept of resurrection that is available to us.”—Stanley Kunitz
I often joke that I want my body added to the compost heap when I am dead. I realize that this is not an option in Ashfield, but the thought comforts me. When I consider afterlife, I picture compost, decaying matter transformed to living matter. A compost pile is an ecological wonder with metaphysical undertones. Through the ages, sentiments of renewal have been expressed using images of recycling. In 1662, the burial service of The Book of Common Prayer claimed: “Therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, dust to dust.” The Ash Wednesday rite marking the beginning of Lent includes the line, “For dust you are and to dust you shall return.” The ash and dust are just earth in a powdered form. In 1980 David Bowie sang, “Ashes to ashes, funk to funky.” We will all return to the earth.
“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, if you want me again look for me under your boot soles.”—Walt Whitman
May 2018
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